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.
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Search Features |
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Function |
Example |
Results |
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Boolean |
space AND mars |
both “space” and “mars” |
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space OR mars |
“space” or “mars” |
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space AND (mars OR venus) |
“space” and either “mars” or “venus”. Always put brackets around OR keywords connected to AND |
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space AND NOT mars |
space, but no pages with “mars” |
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Wildcard |
space AND music* |
space and music, musical, musician, etc. |
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inter*net |
any word with up to five letters between “inter” and “net”, such as Internet, interfacenet, interopnet, etc. |
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Phrases |
electric AND “fastest car” |
includes phrase “fastest car” |
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Language |
zéro |
only French language word “zéro” |
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Letter Case |
EFF |
only capitalized “EFF” |
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eff |
both “eff” and “EFF” |
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Fields |
url:space |
“space” in the URL |
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link:movie |
“movie” in a link name |
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title:mars |
“mars” in the page title |
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text:silver |
“silver” in text of page |
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anchor:back |
“back” in button or link |
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image:venus |
“venus” in image description |
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url:(space and (venus or mars)) |
“space” and “venus” or “mars” in URL |
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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.
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Search Features |
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Function |
Example |
Results |
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Boolean |
race NEAR car |
“race” within ten words of “car” |