Science & Technology
   


New version of AltaVista makes web searches easy

By Geoffrey Legault
Woodlands Public School
Mississauga, Ontario


 

If you have ever been on the Internet, I'm sure you have encountered the many search engines that don't find what you really want. You look up "I still know what you did last summer" so you can see what that movie is all about and the computer spits out one pointless site after the other.

Well, look no further. Digital has now expanded it already popular search engine AltaVista (www.altavista.com) and has now made it so easy to find what you want.

AltaVista first began in 1995 by the Digital Equipment Corporation when researchers started a project which seemed impossible at the time - to index the entire Internet. Technology over the years has expanded the capabilities of AltaVista, but now innovations have made it one of the fastest and most comprehensive search engine on the net today. It has an index of over 125,000,000 (and growing) unique web pages that you can search in less than a second.

 

 
The new altavista site: http://www.altavista.com

One of the latest features AltaVista has introduced is the ability to search for a page in a vast range of languages such as Chinese, Russian, English, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Korean. It also offers an instant translation service so that even if the page you want is in a language you can't understand, you can easily have it translated.

The new version of AltaVista includes AV Family Filter, which allows parents to screen the material their children get on the Web and AV Photo Finder, which helps you track down particular photos on the Web.

The AltaVista index - approximately 200 Gigabytes of data - is created by a "web spider" named Scooter who roams around the web collecting about six million new pages per day. Scooter then sends it to a server that takes the information and indexes each word from very page. This means if you are looking for a late-breaking story, you are bound to find it at AltaVista.

Whether you use the simple search to quickly find something you need, or the advanced search to specify exactly what you need, AltaVista offers a service unparalleled on the web, which is why it is the number one choice for millions of Internet users.


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