In March 2004 the AltaVista search engine was discontinued. The AltaVista site is now powered by the Yahoo! Search Engine. Some of the features listed below may not be working at the moment.
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Links:
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Alta
Vista Simple Search
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Home page
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www.altavista.com
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Will search in…
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www
Looksmart Directory
Overture pay-per-click text ads
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Default search
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AND
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Case sensitive
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Yes
Words and phrases in quotes are case-sensitive. Hence in order to search for uncommon spellings, enclose the word/term in double quotation marks: "eXtra"
All lower-case matches everything.
Items not in quotes are not case sensitive
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Natural language queries
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Yes
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Spell check
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English
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Translates pages into another language
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Yes
cp. Babelfish.
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SYNTAX
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Alta
Vista Simple Search
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Find pages that have one or more of these words
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dog OR cat
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Find pages that contain all these words
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+dog +cat (only in simple search)
dog AND cat
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Find pages that contain the first, but not the last, word
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dog -cat (only in simple search)
dog AND NOT cat
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Find pages that contain the following exact phrase
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"raining cats and dogs"
Alta Vista has automatic phrase detection: a large set of commonly
used phrases that will be interpreted as such even if you do not
use " --"
1-800-555-1212 Dashes link numbers together as a phrase
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Find pages that contain these words in near proximity of
each other
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dog NEAR cat (within 10 words of each other)
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Find pages that contain words that start with the following
letters
(joker-signs, truncation, wildcards)
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dog*
finds "dog", "dogs", "doghouse" etc.
(The stem must have at least three letters.)
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Nesting (Use of parentheses)
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(cats AND dogs) OR pets
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FIELD SEARCH
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Alta
Vista Simple Search
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Find pages that have the following http-address (or parts
of address)
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url:aviana
or (if you are looking for a specific computer)
host:aviana.com
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Find pages under the following domain
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domain:com (only top level domains or country letter code)
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Find pages that contain images with names that contains
the following word
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image:lassie.gif
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Find pages that contain links to the following address
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link:www.aviana.com
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Find pages that contain the following word in the title
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title:dog
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Find pages that contain the following text anywhere in the
HTML-code
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No
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Find pages written in a particular language
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Use advanced
menu.
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Find pages made in the following time period
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Use advanced
menu.
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FIELD SEARCH USENET NEWSGROUPS
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Alta
Vista Simple Search
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Find this newsgroup
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No
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Find this text in the subject field of newsgroup messages
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No
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Find messages that are written by the following
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No
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Find messages that are dated…
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No
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More information on simple searching
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Alta
Vista simple search
Alta
Vista FAQ for searchers
UC
Berkeley tutorial
ResearchBuzz on Alta Vista Special Syntax
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