AltaVista
AltaVista currently claims one of the largest search engine databases at over 550 million websites. As discussed in the "Search Engines" section, AltaVista offers both a Simple Search and an Advanced Search page. Simple Search requires the use of implied Boolean logic (plus and minus), while Advanced Search requires full Boolean logic (and, or, and not). The Advanced Search page also requires that the most important keyword appear in the "Sort by" search box in order to return the most relevant results at the top of the list. Both the Simple and Advanced pages support phrase searching, field searching (title, domain, host, URL, and link searches), and truncation (*).
NEAR SEARCHING
AltaVista offers a number of powerful search features not found elsewhere. One very effective tool available on the Advanced Search page is the NEAR search. A NEAR search limits results to pages where keywords appear within 10 words of each other. This can be extremely helpful in situations where an AND search produces too many results and a phrase search (" ") produces too few results.
champagne near history
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TRANSLATION
Whenever your search results list a relevant resource in another language, check out AltaVista's translation feature. With this service, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese websites are translated to English (and vice versa).
To use this capability, enter your keywords and click the Search button at either the Simple or Advanced Search page. When the search results appear, click the Translate link at the bottom of the result of interest.
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SPECIALTY SEARCHES
AltaVista offers several specialty search engines including an image finder, an MP3/audio finder, a video finder, and a people finder.
The image search tool can be especially handy for locating clipart, graphics, or other image files.
Practice Finding Images
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