Web Search--AltaVista Changes and Other Happenings at AltaVista
All sorts of stuff going on at AV. The big question about how Yahoo will utilize the Overture technology (AV and ATW) and programming talent is to be determined. Nevertheless, it's good to see the AV team continuing to improve their product.
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* AV has dropped using a Moreover news feed for their wonderful AV News database. They're now using their own crawler to gather material from about 4000 sources.
* The AV News database now contains over 10,000,000 archived urls back to May, 2001. This means that you'll likely find material beyond the 2/4 week limit that you often see with other news search tools. These urls are checked on a regular basis to see that they still link to available material. Make sure to use the pull-down option to access this content.
* AV's Prisma, a tool that helps refine your search, is now available with AV News.
* AV is now using the ODP (Open Directory Project) as its web directory. Wouldn't it be great if a major engine would also license content from a non-commercial source like the LII, InfoMine, or AcademicInfo where quality of entries really matters? They also provide very useful annotations.
* You'll see a few changes on results pages including the elimination of the sponsored ad links that often appear along the right margin of a results page. AltaVista Prisma "refine your search" choices will move to this location.
* Look for AltaVista and AllTheWeb to begin using an "integrated back end" (the best of each engines capabilities) and the same underlying database sometime this Fall. However, both AV and ATW will remain online with each site potentially offering different search capabilities.
* Look for another AV announcement in the next two weeks.
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