Advanced Searching With Alta Vista
      By Bob Rankin - Reprinted from The InternetTourbus newsletter, with permission from the author.

Alta Vista has for a long time been my favorite search engine. It's the biggest and the baddest, in terms of both size and power.

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's a little tip for you: Don't bother clicking the "Advanced Search" button at Alta Vista. You can do some really amazing things with leaving the AV home page. In fact, even the people who develop AV use "simple search" almost exclusively! Here are some tips for fine tuning your AV searches:

1) 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

2) 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 40 hits! Now we're down to the level where you can check out each matching document without spending hours.

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

4) 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.

5) 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.

5) 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:tourbus.com - find pages linked to the TOURBUS site 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

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