AltaVista Launches AltaVista ParaPhrase, New Crawling Initiative

Seems like the new hot thing is providing suggestions to narrow a
search. Teoma trumpeted that in its new launch and now AltaVista is
touting their beta test of AltaVista Paraphrase. One percent of US-based
visitors to AltaVista.com will get to check out the tool.

Here's how it works. Enter a search query. The results will come with a
light orangish box on top. The box will contain suggestions for keywords
to refine your search. If you've used AlltheWeb.com, you'll notice that
it looks very similar to their Beta FAST Topics.

Just for the heck of it I did a little shootout. I ran "radiology" at
Teoma, AlltheWeb, Vivisimo, and AltaVista. Teoma had three refining
suggestions. AlltheWeb had none, strangely enough. Vivisimo's
"clustering engine" offered twenty clusters. AltaVista offered twelve
suggestions, and while none of them was geographically oriented, some of
them seemed too general to be helpful ("residents," "patients,"
"doctor.") This is only one search, and to do a thorough shootout I'd
have to do several different types of words and proper names, but it's
amazing to see how different the suggestions and clusters turned out to
be for this one search.

In other AltaVista news, AltaVista has started a crawling initiative to
gather non-commercial content. Four times a day they are checking
several areas which provide information on new Web sites, and crawling
them. "Our aim is diversity and completeness of coverage," said Jon
Glick, Director for Internet Search Services at AltaVista. "We want to
find good-quality, non-commerce material." AltaVista had about 600
million pages as of a couple of weeks ago, and while they are expanding
they do not have an ultimate page number goal.

Posted to Search Engines-AltaVista