AltaVista and Case-Sensitivity

One of the differences between Altavista ( http://www.av.com) and Google is that AV's case-sensitive, which makes it more useful for some searches.

I discovered last week while doing some research for an article that AV has apparently changed how it handles case-sensitivity. Before any search used to be case-sensitive. Now, it appears, only searches that are in quotation marks are case-sensitive. For example:

interNET - 102,316,783 results

"interNET" -- 1,591 results

CaLiFoRnIa -- 19,800,132 results

"CaLiFoRnIa" -- 94 results

I don't know too much about this shift -- when I e-mailed my last contact at AltaVista, the e-mail bounced, and I haven't heard back from anybody else. If you know when this change took place drop me a note. In the meantime, if you want to use the case-sensitivity feature on AltaVista, be sure to enclose the appropriate query strings in quotes.

Posted to Search Engines-AltaVista