AltaVista Search Engine Information

Out of all of the search engines, AltaVista has always been known to have the greatest range and power. If you want to find a lot of matches for anything, use AltaVista. 

This search engine was launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation (the company that created the OpenVMS operating system). AltaVista was developed in the Palo Alto labs and was the first really big, useful search engine.

In January of 1999 Compaq took it over when they purchased Digital. Late that year they purchased Shopping.Com and and zip2 and added them to the portal.

The search engine did not last long at Compaq. In August of 1999, a company called CMGI, Inc. purchased 83% of the stock . Shopping.Com and Zip2 became wholly owned subsidiaries. 

In 1999 AltaVista added Ask Jeeves so that surfers can now ask questions to the portal. 

AltaVista is an automatic engine, meaning it uses a robot to scan web sites for pages and add or update them into it's index. No human being is involved in the process, except possibly for occasional reviews and abuse investigations. Altavista also spiders your entire site, meaning you only have to submit the home page to get all of them listed.

AltaVista uses the standard Metatags to get the description, author and keywords. In the absence of these tags, AltaVista will attempt to make something up based upon the document contents. It is important to know that AltaVista considers text within the document and the title far more important than the keyword Metatag.

Altavista considers the following things in order of importance when ranking a site which is submitted:

• Long pages of meaningful text
• Pages with lots of links that have related content (not random meaningless links generated by link exchange programs)
• The number of distinct links (links from different domains) to a site. A site or page is considered good is many good sites have links to it.
• Deepness within a site. Pages buried deep within a site will not be seen by the spider.

Another important distinction is "Keep in mind that in any query, rare words count more than common words. If someone searches for fruit and pomegranates, pages with the word pomegranates will appear at the top of the list (a technique known as 'inverse document frequency'). Hence you should use specific terms on your pages, in your anchors, and in your Metatags, not general ones that won't give you any advantage. Be specific whenever you can."

An interesting distinction made by Altavista is the text associated with a link to your site makes your site go up or down in ranking. For example, if someone links to your site with "Internet Tips" as the text for the anchor, and your site contains the words "Internet tips", then you are more likely to be ranked higher.

The H1 and H2 tags are very important to AltaVista. Keywords contained within these tags and the document body will have increased rankings. According to some reports, also using the <B> tag (to bold the headers) will improve rankings even more.

To submit a site to AltaVista, go to the page above. Submit each page of your site separately. AltaVista will include the pages within their index in a few days.

Other AltaVista search engines include:

• AltaVista.dk - Danish
• AltaVista.nl - Dutch
• AltaVista.fr - French
• AltaVista.de - German
• AltaVista.ie - Irish
• AltaVista.it - Italian
• AltaVista.se - Swedish search engine
• AltaVista.co.uk - United Kingdom