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AltaVista was also a university project like Google in the same term AltaVista is one step close to Google in giving efficient results.
AltaVista was started by Louis Monier during the spring of 1995. His web spider, Scooter, first crawled the web on July 4, 1995, and went public on December 15, 1995. In July of 1997, different languages were introduced. Multimedia and image searching became available in February of 2000.
Overture Web Services acquired AltaVista on April, 2003, for a $140 million cash and stock deal.
AltaVista has a web index of about 600 million documents, not much compared to Google's three billion plus. AltaVista concentrates more on giving accurate and relevant results than on the size of the database.
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AltaVista has many web features, and is very strong in relevance:
Boolean Capibilities - AltaVista is the only search engine to have FULL Boolean capabilities.
Babelfish Translation - AltaVista has introduced a new translation service which can translate any web page or any text , it called in "Babel fish"
Field Searching - AltaVista's field searching allows a searcher to cluster the results into specific types:
anchor: Term(s) located in the text of a hyperlink. anchor:"open-site"
applet: Pages containing a Java applet with the term in the name. applet:morph
domain: For top-level domain only. domain:edu
host: For a particular site. host:open-site.org
image: Pages have an image with term in filename. image:gull finds pages with gull.gif
link: Hypertext links include the term(s). link:notess.com finds pages with links to this site.
text: Pages include the term(s) somewhere other than in an image tag, link, or URL.
title: Hits have the term(s) in the HTML title element. title:"search engines"
url: Pages have the term(s) somewhere in the URL (host name, path, or filename). url:searchenginewatch
like: Find similar pages to the submitted URL. Requires a complete URL, although the http:// can be omitted. Works in Simple Search, Advanced Search Sort by box, but not Advanced Search Boolean box. Is the same function as clicking on the Related pages link in the display. It cannot be combined with other search terms. like:notess.com
Internet Explorer Toolbar - like Google, AltaVista also has a toolbar service which lets a searcher use the majority of AltaVista's features from the searcher's browser.
and many minor features
AltaVista has many minor features but excludes a major feature: Cached
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