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The AltaVista search engine
AltaVista
- a look at this search engine
In the far-off last years of the last century before Google took over the online world, Altvista was a major search engine, and the first choice for many surfers. Somewhere along the line it lost its way. It is now part of Overture, and has reverted to a simple Google-like interface without any clutter. It offers searching for web pages, images, MP3s, video and news.
1. Commercial product - digital cameras Sponsored (PPC) listings appear at the top and right of the web results, so that in a normal sized window there are 9 Yahoo-sourced ads and only 2 'pure' results in view before scrolling!! However, when you do scroll the top few results are good, with Kodak, Cnet reviews, About and Howstuffworks featured.
2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name We used the term Sony Cybershot. The sponsored results are right on target as you would expect, while the pure results are good also, with the Sony home page and many camera review sites near the top.
3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs While the commercial results are fine, with ebay, amazon and cduniverse, the pure reults are a bit ragged, with cleverly optimised pages for specific bands managing to get onto the first page - these would be of little interest to most searchers.
4. Entertainment - Britney Spears Sponsored results reveal Britney Spears ringtones are hot, for some reason. Her official site makes the top spot in the pure results, while the other top results are a good mixture of fan pages and commercial sites selling her music.
5. Entertainment - games cheats Things start to look poor here - the inconsistent way page snippets are displayed (sometimes one line, sometimes four lines) and the random slicing of the extracted snippets make it difficult to judge how useful a target site would be. The default search is not a phrase, but individual words, so snippets like 'game sales jump 16%' appear. Disappointing.
6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology The correct page is displayed at the top of the results listings (out of 1.3 million). The more pages option, which basically gives all results for the site, becomes useful here too.
7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel Both sponsored and pure results were useful, with the sponsored results being all agencies and the pure results a mixture of agencies and actual Dublin hotel pages.
8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare Impressive and relevant results here.
9. Research - asthma information Though the sponsored results focus on product information rather than asthma information, the quality of the listings overall was good.
10. Research - Iraq maps The sponsored results include a bizarre offering from eBay for 'transportation collectables' - hard to see how that would be of any interest for someone searching for a map of Iraq. The pure results were acceptable, but with probably too much focus on news sites with maps relevant only to particular stories.
11. Searching - Dogpile.com The relevant site was number one on the listings.
12. Searching - Ask Jeeves This is a tricky search because the site is now known as 'Ask' and the old butler has been fired, but the search has the relevant site at the top.
Summary: AltaVista produces generally good results for all queries; if you like using it, we would recommend that you use their advanced web search when necessary for phrase or Boolean searching. However, there is something dull and uninspiring about the Altavists interface, as if not much attention is being given to keeping things fresh.
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