Information to aid in an Alta Vista search
Material describing how to conduct an improved search on Alta
Vista.
This material has been extracted from the Alta Vista page to improve
response time. For the complete page go to Alta Vista and
click the "Help" button on the upper right of the page
- paris "petite galerie" louvre
- Finds documents containing as many of these words and phrases
as possible, ranked so that documents with the most matches are
presented first.
-
- A phrase is any string of adjacent words. The preferred way
to link words into a phrase is to use quotes.
-
- Lower-case search will find matches of capitalized words also.
For example, paris will find matches for paris, Paris,
and PARIS.
-
- Capital letters in a search will force an exact case match
on the entire word. For example, submitting a query for parIS
will search only for matches of parIS. (Don't be surprised
if there are none.)
- +noir +film -"pinot noir"
- Matches may be required, or prohibited. Precede a required
word or phrase with + and a prohibited one with -. This query
finds documents containing film and noir, but
not containing pinot noir.
- antique;pump;organ
- Punctuation glues words into a phrase, just as quotes do.
Punctuation is treated as white space, so this example is equivalent
to "antique pump organ" (that is, three words
enclosed in quotes).
- quilt*
- This query matches pages that contain at least one word such
as quilt, quilts, quilting, quilted,
quilter etc. Hint: The *-notation is
also useful for searching for variant spellings. For example,
alumi*m will find matches for both aluminum
and the British English aluminium.
-
To find the documents most relevant to what you need, construct
your query as precisely as you can. AltaVista ranks the documents
found so the ones matching the most words and phrases in the query
are listed first. Even so, you might not find exactly what you
want at the head of the list if your search is too general.
For example, suppose you wanted information about the languages
of American Indians but you did not know any specific language
to search for. You might start with the following query: american
indian language. (The word-count numbers quoted here are
not updated as new pages are indexed. They serve as an example
only.)
- american indian language
- result:
- word count: indian 395185, language 2048030, american 2654433.
100000 documents found containing as many of these words as possible,
in both upper and lower case.
- observation:
- This search is much too broad. Of the first ten documents
found, the first few appear relevant, but the rest are documents
about languages in the Asian subcontinent.
- strategy:
- Make clear how you want the query to be parsed. In other words,
link american and indian together as a phrase.
Include the plural of language in the search also by
using the *-notation.
- "american indian" language*
- result:
- word count: american indian 30000, language* 2050463. 20000
documents found.
- observation:
- The documents found are now relevant to information about
American Indian languages, enabling you to refine your search
further. For example, suppose you want to know more about the
ojibwe language that was mentioned in one of the documents
found by this query.
- strategy:
- Require that the word ojibwe and its variants ojibway
and ojibwa be included in your next search. Since this
is an American Indian word, you could now omit american indian
from the search.
- language* +ojibw*
- result:
- word count: ojibw* 3625, language* 2050463. 1000 documents
found.
- observation:
- Bingo!
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