In the last 45 days or so, AltaVista has been a busy little Internet beaver!To start the ball rolling, they were acquired in June by CMGI, a top diversified Internet operating company. This actually raises more
questions than it answers, since CMGI owns 20% of Lycos. This means that CMGI now has ties to 3 major portals, AltaVista, Lycos, and HotBot. Questions now include whether or not AV will join the other two in that
"stable."
They have also announced their intention to focus on the "most experienced, most prolific users on the net."
AltaVista immediately begain rolling out several new services. Apparently,
they were all meant to help begin their transition to a network which includes shopping and portal services to augment its search services. They also reaffirmed their early stated goal of crawling the entire Internet.
Among other things announced were their new "freshness guarantee," which claims to guarantee that its entire ever-growing 140,000,000-page index will be refreshed at least every 28 days. They also promise to
remain the fastest of all search engines to add URLs to its index. Can they do it? Time will tell.
They also announced their intention to deliver more than 25 distinctive new search features by the end of the year.
According to President and CEO of AltaVista Company, Rod Schrock, "As other Internet companies have de-emphasized improving their Web search experience, AltaVista has grown ever more determined to make searching
the Internet a more relevant, satisfying experience. The new search features we will unveil throughout the year will establish a level of search excellence unprecedented in the industry."
They will be designing a
new format featuring global navigation bar providing one-click navigation across to the entire AltaVista Network and wide screen viewing to maximize the search information available to the user.
They announced
partnerships with media companies in an all-out effort to create personalized local portal sites. For more information on this move, see their press release at http://www.altavista.com/av/content/pr062899d.htm.
On
July 22, they scrapped their Relevant Paid Links advertising program, a joint effort with DoubleClick which was discussed in the June issue of S.E.L.L. According to an email sent to participants in the program,
"After several months of evaluation and feedback, we believe, in general, this program does not meet the needs of the majority of our advertising partners." According to officials at AV, "We are looking
at a replacement for it, and stay tuned."
For a couple of months now, there have been reports about pages coming up missing or bizzare search results. A search would yield 250,000+ results one minute and 3 a
minute or two later. Needless to say, the search engine community was horrified, and this alone fueled forums and email groups. According to official AltaVista personnel, these problems were due to engineering
changeovers at AV. They also swear the problems are over now, although I personally, check my key rankings there on a daily basis.
They also rolled out a new form for people who find offensive material which slipped
past the Family Filter. This form is for users to fill out when they find spam. The pages will be placed on a list for review, as opposed to being immediately removed, presumably to keep people from maliciously getting
competitors removed from the index.
This fall, AltaVista will be powering MSN search, and according to Mr. Schrock, it is very likely that MS email and instant messaging options will be available on AV at that time.
On the Alta Vista Channels menu, if you click on My Alta Vista, and then scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see a section called "Web Directory." This directory is the Open Directory Project, although
the information is apparently updated irregularly. The current data is at least 2 months old.
