|
General
|
AltaVista is also one of the largest search engines on the web, in terms of
pages indexed. Its comprehensive coverage makes it a favorite among researchers. It's
the only major search engine that allows to use the proximity operator NEAR (see Boolean
logic).
When you enter a series of words, with no punctuation, AltaVista matches all pages on which
any of those words appear. But the pages that include all the terms you have entered appear
near the top of the list, and those with fewer appear lower, and those with only one go to
the very bottom. In Boolean terms, it interprets your query as if the terms were separated
by OR. So you can simply enter a series of words, and have confidence that the pages which
are the best matches for you are likely to end up at the top of the list.
Alta Vista treats all punctuation equally. All queries that are the same other than the
punctuation will yield the same results. A word with a hyphen is treated as if it
where two words joined in a phrase.
If your search words appear in the page description, those words appear highlighted on the
results page.
You can restrict your search to pages in any one of the languages listed.
|
|
Case Sensitive
|
No: without quotation marks.
Yes: if you surround the query with quotation marks.
|
|
Phrase searching
|
Enclose the phrase in quotation marks " ", e.g. "like
this phrase"
.
|
|
To require
|
Use + immediately before a word, e.g. hyperactivity +children
.
|
|
To exclude
|
Use - immediately before a word, e.g. cats -dogs
.
|
|
Boolean logic
|
AND: default, assumed between words.
OR: use OR between words.
NEAR: use NEAR between words, this ensures that both words are within 10 words of each
other.
AND NOT: to Excludes documents containing the specified word or phrase.
You can use parenthesis ().
|
|
Stemming
|
No.
|
|
Wildcards
|
Use the asterisk * to replace multiple characters. Note: You cannot
enter an asterisk at the beginning of a word in your query. But you can enter it after three
characters and have it stand for up to 5 characters.
|
|
Sub-searching
|
No.
|
|
Field searching
|
The keywords can be combined with other words to narrow the search. You must
repeat the keyword to search for more than one word or phrase, e.g. anchor:job
anchor:career
find pages with anchors containing either the word job or the word career.
anchor:text
finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the text of a hyperlink, e.g. anchor:job
+programming
find pages with job in a link and with the word programming in the content of the page.
applet:class
e.g. applet:morph
find pages using Java applets called morph.
domain:domainname
e.g. domain:uk
find pages from the United Kingdom, domain:com
find pages from commercial sites, Domain:uk +"Pride and Prejudice"
finds pages for "Pride and Prejudice" in the United Kingdom.
host:hostname
finds pages on a specific computer, e.g. host:www.shopping.com
find pages on the Shopping.com computer, host:dilbert.unitedmedia.com
find pages on the computer called dilbert at unitedmedia.com.
image:filename
e.g. image:beaches
find pages with images called beaches, +image:beaches +Kerala
narrows the list to pages with images of beaches that also mention Kerala.
like:URL
finds pages similar to or related to the specified URL, e.g. like:www.abebooks.com
finds Web sites that sell used and rare books, similar to the www.abebooks site, like:sfpl.lib.ca.us/
finds public and university library sites, like:https://www.indiaxs.com/
finds sites about culture on the Indian subcontinent.
link:URL
e.g. link:www.myway.com
find all pages linking to myway.com.
text:text
finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag,
link, or URL (the text can be in a metatag), e.g. text:graduation
find all pages with the term graduation in them.
title:text
limits your search to the "HTML Title" of pages. On the other hand, taking that
into account, AltaVista gives priority to the HTML title in its ranking; so pages that
contain a match for your query in the HTML title will probably appear near the top of your
list whether you use title: or not.
url:text
e.g. url:myway
find all pages on all servers that have the word myway in the URL (the host name, path, or
file name).
|
|
