Yale University Library/Internet Search Engines

Exercise 3: Alta Vista

Alta Vista - http://www.altavista.digital.com

Alta Vista claims to be the biggest and fastest search engine, indexing 30 Million pages and 4 Million Usenet articles. One of Alta Vista's great strengths is its ability to search for pieces of web pages (links, URLs, titles). Be sure to read the help files for both Simple and Advanced searches for additional explanation of these features.

1. Alta Vista Simple Searches (do not use boolean operators)
Entering simple searches in Alta Vista is surprisingly complicated.

"george bush" finds the phrase george bush lowercase or capitalized. Quotes are necessary to search as a phrase.

"George Bush" finds the phrase George Bush capitalized only.

George;Bush is the same as the previous search. All punctuation is interpreted as a space.

col*r * truncates up to 5 letters.

+noir +film -"pinot noir" Use the + sign to require a word, and the - sign to eliminate a word from your results. This is the same as using the boolean operators AND and NOT.

title:"New York Times" looks for the phrase New York Times in the title tag of the page. See the list below for more ways to constrain searches.

2. Alta Vista Advanced Searches (Uses Boolean Operators)

AND - "Sergei Eisenstein" and Potem*kin

OR - ("Sergei Eisenstein" or "D.W. Griffith") and (montage or "mise-en-scene")

NEAR - "George near Bush" and "Gulf War"

NOT - "film noir" and not pinot renaissance and (italy or france) and (church or cathedral) and not gothic

RANKING: "Sergei Eisenstein" and Potem*kin
enter montage in the Results Ranking Criteria box. All hits with the word montage will be listed first.

3. Constraining Searches In Alta Vista (The Web)
These limits can be applied in both Simple and Advanced Searches.

anchor:click-here

applet:NervousText

host:library.yale.edu

image:yale.gif

link:http://www.library.yale.edu/pubstation/workstat.html

text:"Yale University Library" near Internet

title:"The Wall Street Journal"

url:netscape.com

4. Constraining Searches In Alta Vista (Newsgroups)

from:napoleon@elba.com

subject:"for sale"

newsgroups:rec.humor

summary:invest*

keywords:NASA

On to Exercise 4: Metasearch Engines