AltaVista Gets Piles O' Patents

AltaVista announced yesterday that with the recent award of four patents, they've gotten a total of 38 patents.

Now, I don't get it. Maybe it's me. But considering the huge debates over patents in the Internet community (which one could assume would exist equally along the power users AV is trying to win back) why talk about this at all? I mean, if you've got more patents than any other search engine than you're the most powerful and popular, right? If you are, why holler about it? And if you're not -- won't this press release bring up the dichotomy?

If I were AltaVista I would have headlined the press release with the fact that they're expanding their search network to 35 country-specific sites. Now that's an area where they really are a leader. http://mx.altavista.com doesn't have anything in it yet, though. (You know what would be cool? If AltaVista started building search engines for individual states. I would really groove on, for example, AltaVista Alaska.)

There is one part of the press release I had trouble understanding: "The company also has the ability to add all the elements of a Web page to an index, wherein each element of that given page can then be searched with a single query." An ALT tag is an element, right? I have been dreaming of a search engine that can also search ALT tags. If someone from AV reads this, please drop me an e-mail and let me know the special syntax for searching ALT tags. Thanks.

You can read the press release yourself at http://biz.yahoo.co m/prnews/001113/ca_altavis.html .

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