Using Alta Vista
The following is a picture of the opening screen to the Alta Vista search site, which is located at www.altavista.digital.com. You will notice that it is very similar to Infoseek, the only difference being the addition of an option for form of the results.
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Keywords
Keywords are entered into Alta Vista the exact same way as they are entered into Infoseek, simply type the keyword and start the search. Alta Vista also supports capitalization in the same manner as Infoseek. For a case sensitive search, use capitalized words, else the search will be considered case insensitive.
Phrases
With Alta Vista, you can perform phrase searches the same way that you did with Infoseek. By putting the phrase in quotation marks, such as
Multiple Keywords
To perform searches with multiple keywords, you use the exact same method as discussed in the Infoseek tutorial. Words which must appear are superseded by a plus sign (+) and those which are to be excluded are put behind a minus sign (-). As an example,
Result Form
Unlike Infoseek, Alta Vista allows you to choose which form you want the returned links to be in. There are three forms, compact, standard and detailed. The standard form will return the name of the link and either a short description of the site (if available) or the first few text lines of the page. The compact form is just that, more compact than the standard form. It shows each link on only one line, beginning with the link and the first few words of the site description. These two forms are pictured below, the one on the bottom is in standard and the one on the top is in compact form. Detailed form is very much like standard. Usually you cannot even tell the difference between them. In fact, the only difference is that once in a while detailed will show you more information on a site, but this is only if such information is available.
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Search Location
Using Alta Vista, you may also choose where you wish to search, either the world wide web or Usenet newsgroups. The location does not effect how the search is performed, so all the rules that have been discussed in searching the web, apply to searching the newsgroups. The standard result form for newsgroups is very similar to the compact form of web sites. You get a single line that gives the article followed by who posted it and where. Detailed from simply allows for longer names and places to be displayed and everything is on its own line.
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