Tips For AltaVista Search Engine

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Open window to AltaVistaAltaVista. AltaVista takes advantage of the META Description Tag when indexing a Web site.

On June 17, 2003 FAST acquired AltaVista's enterprise search business from Overture who had purchased AltaVista earlier that year on April 28, 2003. But on Oct. 7, 2003 Yahoo! purchased Overture. It is reported by Yahoo! that Overture.com owned and operated AltaVista, alltheweb and Inktomi prior to the purchase. Although AltaVista displays a copyright by Overture at the bottom of their Web page, Yahoo! owns and operates Overture. Now with Yahoo! running Overture it appears that Yahoo! is in the driver's seat for all these engines. This is Yahoo!'s answer to directly compete with Google's search engine.

General Information:

The AltaVista search engine starts by spidering the Web page you submitted with its spider Slurp. Slurp may take up to three months to spider and index your entire site, but will usually index your submitted Web page within a day or two. The more popular your site, the more frequent it will be updated. Your best bet is to submit your pages using Easy Submit at the rate of no more than 30 per week. However, when you submit your 50th page under one subdirectory you will trigger a "spam alert" and you will be visited by human eyes at AltaVista - be very careful to avoid the appearance of spam. We also suggest you do not resubmit the same page twice in any given week.

The AltaVista indexer gives higher priority for keywords located in certain Tags (TITLE Tags and META Description Tags). A higher priority is given for keywords that are located near the top of the page. AltaVista also gives a tad higher ranking for keywords appearing closer to each other on the page. Keyword density and popularity is an important factor with AltaVista. See also: Open window to Yahoo! META Tags Yahoo!'s Help (AltaVista's help is now redirected to Yahoo!'s network).

AltaVista has been the sentimental favorite of the pocket protector crowd for quite awhile because AltaVista is more predictable than Google and they allow the searcher much more advanced query building than that of most others. The original AltaVista was created out of a research project at Digital Equipment Corporations Research Laboratories in Palo Alto California USA, but that was then.

AltaVista incorporated their own version of Google's PageRank and in our opinion does it much better.

Rankings Priority Rundown:

1. Keyword or phrase appearing in the TITLE
2. Keyword or phrase appearing in the META Descriptoin Tag
3. Keyword or phrase appearing near the top of page
4. Individual keywords appear close together

- Document date of origin: Touch higher for the oldest pages.
- Document length. Longer documents tend to do better.

Special Tips:

There are also a couple of "human" eyes from AltaVista that will visit your site once you reach 100 urls submitted or 50 urls under any one subdirectory of a domain. These will read from the AltaVista digital domain but will be Mozilla browsers of unknown configuration. If you get visited by these browsers - you are being checked out by a human to make sure you are not spamming the AltaVista index and to compare the Slurp retrieved page with Mozilla retrieved page.

* WARNING *: If the robot retrieved Web page does not match the Mozilla retrieved page, your entire site can be black listed by AltaVista. (many search engines are starting to use this technique).

AltaVista limits your submissions to 5 pages per day.

Our Evaluation:
(Summary. strong points, weaknesses, criticism, recommendations to users etc.)

AltaVista seems to be a powerful search engine. Possible to limit searches to certain fields. Powerful boolean and proximity operators. Online manual is also extensive. Query structures are not limited, but in certain situations we have doubted performance in complex search statements. Harvesting program Slurp doesn't seem to index sites very deeply. Sometimes AltaVista drops pages from it's index and after a while they reappear. You can get different results from simultaneous, exactly same searches. Mirror site databases are different from the main site.