January 16 2001

The alternative AltaVista

AltaVista is in trouble. It has closed down its Internet service provider, reduced its staff dramatically and lost two CEOs in less than a year. Some analysts argue that it has stretched its resources too thin, trying to become everything for everyone. They argue that the company should focus on what it knows best: Internet searching.

We agree that the survival of AltaVista depends on its ability to deliver high quality precision searching to Internet searchers, including information professionals like librarians and researchers.

AltaVista has been known as one of the best search engines for professionals, not least because of the site's impressive tools for advanced searching, Boolean queries included. The site has also an excellent help section.

During the last year, and especially during the last couple of months, the search engine discussion fora on the Net has been buzzing with complaints about the quality of AltaVista search results.

This may partly be due to the rise of Google, which has developed an uncanny ability to deliver relevant results, thus highlighting any AltaVista deficiencies.

However, the general gloom is also caused by several changes in the algorithm that determines the composition of results, as it seems it has been changed for the worse.

What not many know is that AltaVista is currently using two different algorithms on two different versions of the site. We have also reason to believe that the two alternatives are using different versions of the AltaVista database.

The standard database used by the version found at the regular AltaVista address (www.altavista.com) is smaller than the one used by the experimental site at listings.altavista.com. The results presented at listings.altavista.com is also of a better quality than the regular listings.

listings.altavista.com is known as a test site for the AltaVista integration of search results from the pay-per-click GoTo search engine. However, searchers using the AltaVista search alternative at the Netscape site is directed to the listings version, meaning that it already has an official status.

There are other differences. To the individual search results the standard version of AltaVista adds links to the Babelfish translator, more pages from the same site, as well as to related pages. The listings version does not.

This can be a problem, as the alternative version clusters pages from the same website, giving you access to only one page from each site. For instance, a search for "Pandia" brings up our FAQ, not our home page.

In spite of this, we will recommend searchers to try out the listings version, as it is clearly of a better quality that the main AV site.

There is also a third version of the AltaVista search engine, found at www.raging.com, the Google-like alternative for serious searchers who would like to get rid of all the banners and portal bonuses. That version actually presents a third way of calculating the ordering of search results.

We would prefer to have only one AltaVista, a version that combines the unclustering and translation capabilities of the standard search site with the customization of Raging and the search quality of the listings site.

To make this story even more confusing, there actually is yet another version of AV that comes close to achieving this goal. It can be found at partners.altavista.com. We have no idea of how long that one is going to stay, though.

We need AltaVista. Admittedly the Google and Fast databases are larger, and the Google results more accurate, but apart from Northern Light there is no one who understands the need of the serious searcher better than AltaVista. Oh, please AltaVista, get your act together!

• AltaVista standard site
• AltaVista alternative "listings" site
• AltaVista alternative "partners" site
• Raging
• Pandia: AltaVista and Lycos selects GoTo as pay per click search provider
• CommentWire on AltaVista: the view doesn't look high at all

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