Sandra Nijjar Professor: Veronica Harris Course: CMP 230 Information Literacy Date 7/3/2011

What’s Alta Vista AltaVista was one of the three largest and most important search engines for many years, but it is no longer as popular as it used to be.largest It had two distinct search modes: Basic Search and Advanced Search. In August 2000, it introduced a third: the Power Search.Basic Search Advanced Search In Feb. 2002, the Power Search features were added to the Advanced Search page and then in Nov were also moved to the More Precision page.More Precision There are some significant differences between the Basic and Advanced search pages. In Feb. 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture. Overture expected to merge the AltaVista and AlltheWeb databases later in 2003, but once Yahoo! bought Overture, AltaVista's database was replaced by a Yahoo!/Inktomi on March 25, 2004.bought by Overture

Databases: AltaVista has a variety of databases: Web database: AltaVista's own indexed Web pages including PDF files Directory: Open Directory (formerly LookSmart) News: AltaVista's own crawled pages (formerly from Moreover) Ads: from Overture Images: AltaVista's own crawled image files Audio and Video: AltaVista's own crawled multimedia files.

Strengths: * Powerful search features, some unique to AltaVista * Proximity searching, truncation, link searches * International coverage, interfaces, and foreign language handling * Indexes PDF files.

Weaknesses: * Database not as large as it used to be Only indexes first 110K of a Web page and 750K of PDFs * No cached copies of pages or other file types beyond PDFs.