AltaVista Makes Some Changes

Earlier this week AltaVista announced a search enhancement to their site. I got a chance to talk to Gannon Giguiere, AltaVista's Senior Director of Search Verticals, about these new changes. 

First off, the index is a lot bigger. Before the enhancement the index was around 375 million pages. Now it's 550 million fully-indexed, mostly-HTML documents (there are some text documents.) The main page, as I noted a week or so ago, has had a lot of the portalese stuff stripped from it and is a much faster-loading page with faster-loading returns. But since the main page is much simpler than it was before, what's going to happen to Raging Search? "Currently we're going to keep Raging Search, and I don't know of any additional plans with that," Mr. Giguiere said. 

Another part of their search announcement dealt with their new vertical search initiative, which started with a shopping vertical search. Now as you might guess I don't care about the shopping search. But I was tipped to a news vertical, which is being launched on March 7th. That site will feature news from Moreover and other partners, with the feeds going to AltaVista (instead of AltaVista sending out a spider). Mr. Giguiere told me he thought the archives for the news portal would go six weeks deep, which would make it an excellent addition to the news search engine genre. There are several other vertical searches, including technology, finance, and real estate, that are expected to go live in the next 60 to 90 days. 

The search syntax has not changed, but the huge increase of pages is worth a look. I am a little dismayed that a site which has adopted as its new tagline "The Search Company" decided to start off its vertical search initiative with a shopping vertical, but I guess that's the new Internet. I await with interest the news portal's launch next week. 

Posted to Search Engines-AltaVista