Alta Vista boasts the largest web database, with over 100 million pages, and since they index 10 million pages per day, it's likely the freshest as well. But because they catalog every word on every web page, the dreaded "25,679 documents match your query" problem is likely to pop up if you don't specify your search carefully.

True enough, it can be a brute force tool - but if you know how to tame it using the advanced features, you can avoid the "drink from a firehose" syndrome that often results from an Alta Vista query.

Here are some tips for fine-tuning your Alta Vista searches:

Use the "+" and "-" operators

Prefix your search words with "+" to indicate that they MUST occur in a page to be considered a hit, and use "-" to exclude pages. For example:

+chocolate +turtles

will find only pages that contain BOTH words. If you omit the "+" AV will return some pages about chocolate, some about turtles, in addition to pages containing both words. In this example, the difference is 25414 vs. 2467 matches. By adding an exclusion term as shown below, the number of hits drops to 1869.

+chocolate +turtles -peanut

Use quotes for phrases

Well, 1800 matches is still a bit much to digest, so let's turn up the heat at AV. If you really want to find Chocolate Turtles (and not just pages with those two words) put it in quotes. The search

+"chocolate turtles" -peanut

yields only 49 hits! Now we're down to the level where you can check out each matching document without spending hours.

To Find Web Pages Containing	Search Syntax
The word CHOCOLATE or the word TURTLES	chocolate turtles
The word CHOCOLATE and the word TURTLES	+chocolate +turtle
The word TURTLES but not the word PEANUTS	+chocolate -peanuts
The phrase: THOMAS A. EDISON	"thomas a. edison"

Use the "host" and "domain" keywords

Have you ever wanted to look for a specific word at just one website? Try a search like this:

+"chocolate" +host:ama-assn.org

This tells AV to find articles about chocolate published only by the American Medical Association, and it yields just nine hits. You can also exclude a website or an entire domain from a search:

+"tax reform" -host:whitehouse.gov

+"human rights" -domain:cn

The first example excludes documents published by one website, (the US Whitehouse) and the second eliminates all documents from an entire domain (the country of China).

Use the "title" keyword

If you're looking for pages on a specific topic, instead of pages that just contain certain words, try limiting your search like so:

title:"chocolate addiction"

This often helps to weed out unwanted hits. The fact that someone bothered to categorize their page with a (TITLE) keyword should help you get better quality matching documents.

Use the "image" keyword

Looking for a special photo or icon? Try something like this:

image:truffle.gif

+image:comet* +host:nasa.gov

The first should be obvious, the second uses a wildcard to find any image whose name starts with "comet", whether GIF or JPEG, but only on the NASA website.

Use the "link" and "url" keyword

The "link" keyword finds pages that contain a link to another page, and the "url" keyword finds pages with specific characters in the address. Here are some examples:

link:bigeye.com - find pages linked to BigEye

url:elvis - find pages with "elvis" in the address

By combining any of these search terms, your Alta Vista search efficiency can go way up. And I haven't even covered all the special keywords you can use to hone in on the object of your desiring. If you want to learn more about advanced Alta Vista searching, visit

http://doc.altavista.com/help/search/whats_new.html

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