May 3 2001. Updated May 4.

New changes at AltaVista

AltaVista closes Raging Search, changes its advanced search page and adds pictures to search results in the UK.

As we reported in March, AltaVista main objective is no longer to be a Web portal, but a major search site. The process has led to a lot of changes at the site, and the AltaVista staff continue to experiment.

Revised page for advanced Boolean searching

AltaVista has recently changed the search form for advanced Boolean searching, adding an alternative way of choosing the time span of results. You may now use a pull-down menu selecting one of several alternatives (like "anytime" or "two weeks"). This is a useful addition.

Unfortunately, AltaVista has replaced the large text area for Boolean queries with a much smaller one-line search box. We believe the quality of search queries improve if searchers are given room to roam, and it is easier to do so if you can see the whole query at one glance.

Not to worry, though, we have updated our own Powersearch version of the AltaVista advanced search form, which retains the large text area.

AltaVista Advanced Searching has also got a new URL: http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/adv. The old one will no longer work. The Power Search alternative -- which is advanced searching based on pull-down menus -- has been renamed Search Assistant.

Raging.com is dead

A year ago AltaVista introduced the Raging.com search engine, which was basically AltaVista with another face. AltaVista copied the clean and simple Google design, and tried to appeal to searchers that were sick and tired of ads and portal extras.

As AltaVista has once again become a site focusing on search, it has removed much of the clutter on the main site. Hence there is no need to market a separate search site, which only dilutes the AltaVista trade mark.

"In our continuing effort to provide the world's best search experience, we have combined Raging Search with our improved AltaVista Text Search," AltaVista says. "The new Text Search provides all of the features of Raging Search, and more:

• Viewable on text-only browsers
• World-class relevancy
• Lightning-fast performance
• News related to your query."

AltaVista Text Search is basically the standard AltaVista search page without the graphic elements.

Experiments in the UK

The British version of AltaVista is actually quite different from the American one. The home page is a little bit more cluttered. It has a "wall-to-wall" lay-out with graphic icons as opposed the cleaner American version which has a fixed-width design adapted to small monitors. We clearly prefer the American version.

AltaVista is now using the UK site for experiments. Do a search for "zoo" and you will find that some of the result listings are accompanied by pictures. These are not miniature snap-shots of the Web pages as such, but a picture that is automatically taken from the Web site's home page.

By all means, they look nice, but we fail to see how these pictures improves the quality of results. We guess people will be more likely to click on a site with a picture beside it, but the illustration itself does not say much about the quality of the site. However, we can see that it might in some cases say something about relevance.

One could also argue that this is a copyright infringement. The sites themselves may not protest against this use of illustrations, but the photographers and illustrators might.

Adding more graphics to Web pages will make them slower. There are already several logos and banner ads on the result pages, and AltaVista should be careful not to add any more graphical elements.

On the other hand, we like the "MySearch" feature very much. You may save your searches in AltaVista (using a "cookie") for later retrieval. Moreover, you may name and store your 25 favourite searches, which is very useful if you find yourself using the same query over and over again.

According to ResearchBuzz, AltaVista may consider adding MySearch to the American version as well if it becomes popular on non-US sites.

Chaotic results

The search engine optimization discussion forums are full of complaints about AltaVista these days. Noone seems to be able to find out how AltaVista ranks the listings. Sites that have been on the first page for a long time, suddenly drops out of sight, and searches bring up a lot of irrelevant listings.

One theory is that AltaVista is in the middle of a transition phase, and is soon to implement a new and more targeted algorithm. Some argue that AltaVista is preparing a paid-inclusion program in the same vein as Inktomi, while others believe that the search engine is "randomizing" results in order to confuse webmasters.

Then again there are always those who believe AltaVista only care about the money.

Well, something has clearly gone wrong, and AltaVista cannot afford to loose credibility in this way, especially not when it is competing against the much more accurate Google search engine.

We will keep you posted on further developments.

Pay-per-click results

AltaVista will now add more paid search results (read: "ads") to each result page. These are called "Featured Sites" and appear before the regular results. The first one is an ad sold by AltaVista (which may be of no relevance to your query), the second one is from GoTo.

At the moment the GoTo "Sponsored results" that are to appear near the end of each page are not to be seen. That might be caused by a momentary glitch, however.

AltaVista has not renewed its agreement with RealNames. These links have therefore been removed. RealNames main source of traffic is the Explorer browser. If anyone enters a search term in the browser address field (instead of a URL), the browser will query the RealName database.

Search Engine Showdown on the recent changes
Alta Vista Search Assistant
AltaVista Advanced Search
AltaVista UK
Pandia Powersearch form for AltaVista Advanced Search
ResearchBuzz on AltaVista
AltaVista UK on MySearch
AltaVista Europe Debuts Helpful Search Features (Search Engine Watch)
Search Engine Forum discussion on AltaVista's problems

More search engine news...