Computers Today, May 1-15, 1999, The Evolution of AltaVista

May 1-15, 1999 THE NET

SEARCH THE WEB: FIFTH OF A SERIES
The Evolution of AltaVista

'Ask AltaVista' search engine helps searchers narrow the gap between what they enter as their search query, and what they really want to look for.

By Sarita Agarwal

When Compaq bought over Digital Equipment, the original developers of AltaVista, a lot of people thought it was curtains for the service. Instead, Compaq shelled out $3.35 million to buy the rights to the altavista.com URL, replacing the clunky altavista.digital.com moniker. Next, the company poured $10 million into fleshing out the site's services. Has the expenditure been worth it or not? Well, consider this: AltaVista now serves up some 38 million page views everyday. That makes it the tenth most visited site on the Web, based on a recent survey by Web-rating firm RelevantKnowledge. The stated objective, according to company executives, is to take it to the top-3 slot within a year.

New Features

What could do the trick? Recently, AltaVista licensed the Ask Jeeves natural language search engine, which works on a knowledge base of some seven million questions that users commonly ask. Natural language querying, available right at the top on the search page, makes Web searching a more intuitive process. Users state their search text in plain English and receive a short list of questions that refine the query. In response, a list of focussed links are returned. Ask AltaVista helps searchers narrow the gap between what they enter as their search query, and what they really want to look for.

AltaVista's partnership with Virage, an image and video search engine maker, has enabled it to offer AV Photo Finder, located in the links just below the search box, and accessible at http://image.altavista.com/, and Video Search, being tested at http://video.altavista.com/ . The former helps you find photos (black and white and colour) and artwork on the Web; the latter gave users a taste of searching for and locating segments within video clips.

To use AV Photo Finder, just type in your query in the search box, and click on Search. You will see a set of thumbnails. Click on the one you like to view the Webpage containing the full image. Alternatively, click on the About this picture link to read details about the picture including the title and picture size, or the Visually Similar link to find other pictures that share similar features in appearance.

AltaVista was the first major search engine to licence Central Corporation's RealNames System, an alternative Web site addressing system, meant to direct searchers to the correct site when doing brand-oriented searches such as for "Coke" (the site is http://www.coca-cola.com ). RealNames aims at providing a workaround solution to the domain-name-taken-so-we-chose-another-name-and-now-no-one-can-find-us / where-the-heck-is-so-and-so problem, by allowing companies to register their brand names for $100 per year. On a RealNames-enabled site (AltaVista, for example), if the search phrase matches a registered RealName, a RealName link appears at the top of the search results, and clicking on this will take the user directly to the designated site. RealNames claims usage of its system via AltaVista has touched about one million times per day, up from 300,000 per day, when it launched in May 1998.

AltaVista also offers instant language translation capabilities, truly put the "world" into the "World Wide Web." Babelfish, its translation service - the Web's first - translates words, phrases, and entire Web sites online in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. To access it, click on AV Tools & Gadgets, located in the links just below the search box, and follow the AV Translation Service link. Or go directly to http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/. Translation is as simple as typing in to translate / specifying the (complete) URL of the page to translate, selecting the language pair (German to English, for example) to use, and clicking on Translate.

How good is the translation? Well, let's put it this way. There are some things human beings will probably always do better than computers, and translation is, no doubt, one of them.

One last user-friendly feature: AltaVista is also reachable at av.com , apart from the known URL www.altavista.com .

Sarita Agarwal, sarita.agarwal@mailexcite.com

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