AltaVista

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AltaVista (http://www.altavista.digital.com) is a lot like Lycos in its functionality; it's a full-service search engine. Like Lycos, it comes in two varieties: basic and advanced.

With the Basic form, you search the Web or Usenet (choose one from the drop-down list). Usenet is the system that handles most newsgroups on the Internet, so you would choose that only if you were looking for newsgroup data. Most folks, however, will want to stick with the Web.

You search by keyword, entering one or more keywords in the text box. The basic search is an OR search�that is, it finds pages that use at least one of your keywords but not necessarily all of them. As with Lycos, however, AltaVista lists pages that match all the keywords first. For results, you specify Standard, Compact, or Detailed.

Where AltaVista really shines is its Advanced search engine, where experienced users can enter complex criteria to pinpoint exactly what they want to search for. To go to it, click the Advanced button at the top of the basic search form, or go to http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg-aq.

To teach you how to use the Advanced search screen, there is an eight-page Help document available at the AltaVista site; just click the Help button at the top of the page to access it. Here's a quick summary of the options:

• Use standard AND and OR operators, as in the following examples:
• tree AND forest finds pages with both words
• tree OR forest finds pages with either word
• Use quotation marks around multi-word phrases, as in the following:
• "San Juan" finds pages with the phrase "San Juan" but not pages containing both the words "San" and "Juan" separately.
• "Shetland Sheepdog" finds pages with the phrase "Shetland Sheepdog" but not pages containing "Shetland" and "Sheepdog" separately.
• The NEAR operator makes sure words are within ten words of each other on the page, as in the following:
• tree NEAR forest finds pages on which those two words are within ten words of each other.
• Use NOT to exclude words or phrases, as in the following example:
• tree NOT forest finds pages that contain the word "tree" but not the word "forest"
  

In addition to search criteria, you can also specify ranking so that certain search terms have more weight than others. To do this, repeat one of the search terms in the Ranking field box, as in the following example:

• To find pages containing either tree or forest, with pages that contain tree at top of the list, put tree OR forest in the Search field and tree in the Ranking field.
• To find pages containing Shetland Sheepdog and Breeders, with an emphasis on the breeder pages, put "Shetland Sheepdog" AND Breeders in the Search field and Breeders in the Ranking field.

Finally, you can enter a range of dates in the Start Date and Finish Date fields, and pages found will be within that range. This might be helpful, for example, to find only pages that have been updated in the last 30 days�set the Start Date to 30 days ago and the Finish Date to today.

There is even more you can do with AltaVista's search criteria, but the preceding should get you started. For complete instructions, click the Help button on any AltaVista page.