Updated 2.20.02 A quick update. Yesterday, Carole Leita (reference guru and founder of the LII) and I spent a portion of the day at AltaVista HQ. The visit was planned several weeks ago and after the news of Overture acquiring the company we were both expecting to here that the visit was cancelled. It wasn�t. Once we arrived at the company we were expecting to be welcomed have an �expedited tour� and meet a few sad/confused/upset employees along the way. Wrong again. In fact, quite the opposite was true. In fact, several AV execs sat Carole and I down for three hours, on what was a very busy day, and wanted our opinions and ideas about how to work more closely with the library world. With the caveat that things change quickly in the web search business, I don�t think we should count AV out as a very powereful web search engine (more below) out yet.
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---- Web Search--AltaVista
Source: News.Com Overture Buys AltaVista
Further consolidation in the web search world. It wasn't that long ago (in years, a very long time in web years) when AltaVista was THE engine. Then, a failed push to do it all by becoming a portal and a loss of focus on what AV did well, search web pages. AV's buyer Overture is a provider of pay-per-click results to many sites and search engines. What this means for the AltaVista.Com site is to be determined. Let's hope they continue to improve their database of crawled web pages. We've seen some major improvements in recent months. In the last few weeks I've also noticed a big improvement to AltaVista News and their image database. In terms of raw search power, the features that power searcher's love, AltaVista's technology remains the most powerful of all general web search engines. Examples?
1) Allows Truncation of Terms (Google No, AllTheWeb No)
2) Proximity Operator (Near and Within, Not Available With Google)
3) Nesting of Strategies (AllTheWeb Also Offers, Google Does Not Offer)
4) Ranking of Search Terms (Allows You to Tweak Relevancy Ranking, AlltheWeb Now Offers, Google Does Not Offer)
From the News.Com article, "Overture plans to license the technology to its customers, which include Yahoo, MSN and AOL Europe. Overture also will use AltaVista.com to test new search services and marketing products for its advertisers. "We, as many observers know, have been looking at whether and how to add algorithmic search to our arsenal over the last year," said Ted Meisel, Overture president and CEO. "Algorithmic search is a highly engineered product...this was the right time and right product." "It was time to bring the technology in-house so we could provide a complete solution to partners," he said. See Also: Analysis from Search Day See Also: More from The New York Times See Also: Official Overture/AV News Release See Also: Compare Functionality of Engine Using Search Engine Showdown's Feature Chart
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