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AltaVista (Visit this link)
AltaVista is the oldest crawler-based search engine on the web. It opened in December 1995 and for several years was the "Google" of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service. Sadly, an attempt to turn AltaVista into a portal site in 1998 saw the company lose track of the importance of search. Over time, relevancy dropped, as did the freshness of AltaVista's listings and the crawler's coverage of the web. Today, AltaVista is once again focused on search. Improvements have been made, but crawlers such as Google and AllTheWeb.com still provide more comprehensive results. Because of this, AltaVista is probably a third-choice crawler, one to try if you haven't found what you are looking for at one of its competitors. AltaVista does remains strong is in terms of some of the specialty searching it offers. It provides a good image search service, and you can look for video and audio clips, as well. It also has an outstanding news search service. AltaVista was originally owned by Digital, then taken over by Compaq, when that company purchased Digital in 1998. AltaVista was later spun off into a private company, which is now controlled by CMGI.
Submitted by: admin
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Added: Thu Sep 12 2002
