Alta
Vista was originally one of the most feature
rich, powerful search engines, however was gradually
eclipsed by newer engines, and is now used much
less than it used to be.
The Alta Vista search engine was developed by three
people from the Digital Equipment Corporation --
Louis Monier, a researcher from Digital's Western
Research Lab; Joella Paquette, a marketing specialist
in Digital's Internet Business Group; and Paul Flaherty,
a researcher from Digital's Network Systems Lab.
Alta Vista was developed as a research project at
the Digital Palo Alto Lab in the summer of 1995,
and was launched publicly on December 15. Within
three weeks it was handling over 2 million searches
a day, and quickly became one of the most popular
search sites on the Internet.
With the emergence of aggressive competitors and
then the link-popularity method used by Google, Alta
Vista fell behind and lost its leading image.
Key Alta Vista search features are listed below.
Note that operators on Alta Vista need to be entered
in all CAPS to be recognized and work.
|
Search
Features |
|
Function |
Example |
Results |
|
Boolean |
space
AND mars |
both "space" and "mars" |
| |
space
OR mars |
"space" or "mars" |
| |
space
AND (mars OR venus) |
"space" and
either "mars" or "venus". Always put brackets
around OR keywords connected to AND |
| |
space
AND NOT mars |
space,
but no pages with "mars" |
|
Wildcard |
space
AND music* |
space
and music, musical, musician, etc. |
| |
inter*net |
any
word with up to five letters between "inter" and "net",
such as Internet, interfacenet, interopnet,
etc. |
|
Phrases |
electric
AND "fastest car" |
includes
phrase "fastest car" |
|
Language |
zéro |
only
French language word "zéro" |
|
Letter
Case |
EFF |
only
capitalized "EFF" |
| |
eff |
both "eff" and "EFF" |
|
Fields |
url:space |
"space" in
the URL |
| |
link:movie |
"movie" in
a link name |
| |
title:mars |
"mars" in
the page title |
| |
text:silver |
"silver" in
text of page |
| |
anchor:back |
"back" in
button or link |
| |
image:venus |
"venus" in
image description |
| |
url:(space
and (venus or mars)) |
"space" and "venus" or "mars" in
URL |
|
Dates |
1/jan/98
1/feb/98 |
Enter "1/Jan/98" in
the "From" field, and "1/feb/98" in the "To" field
to get documents posted during that period |
History. Alta Vista
and Excite used
to be the only search engines that supported the
powerful NEAR operator,
but Alta Vista no longer distinguishes NEAR from
AND.
|
Search Features |
|
Function |
Example |
Results |
|
Boolean |
race
NEAR car |
"race" within
ten words of "car" |
