This document, written in 1996,
has been preserved for historical reasons only.
How to use AltaVista
Basic instructions
Getting started with AltaVista
Having accessed the AltaVista main page,
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
,
proceed as follows:
- To search for documents containing a particular word,
just type the word in all lower case
in the input area
and select
Submit
(in a manner dependent on
your WWW browser).
You will get a list of documents (with small excerpts from their
contents), ordered according
to certain
ranking rules,
starting with the most relevant documents.
(Please notice that this kind of search does not find
such documents that do not contain the word as such
but only inflected forms or derivations.)
You can then get a document onto your screen
by selecting its title or URL which act as hyperlinks to the
document itself. (Unfortunately,
attempt to get a document may fail for
several reasons.)
- Alternatively,
to search for documents containing words beginning with
a
particular string of characters, type that string followed by
an asterisk (the * character) and proceed as above. For instance,
to find documents containg a word beginning with
integrat
(eg integrate
,
integrated
or integration
), type
integrat*
.
- Or alternatively,
to search for documents containg words from a given
set of words,
type those words separated by blanks. You can use the asterisk
in such searches, too.
- Since the searches mentioned above often produce very long lists
of documents, you may wish to restrict the search. You can prefix
any word with a plus sign (+) which means that the word must appear
in the documents.
You can also use a minus sign (-) which means that the word
must not appear in the documents.
You can start with the instructions given above, but
by learning more about AltaVista you can significantly
improve the efficiency of searches.
The second step in learning to use AltaVista
You will often find it effective to use the following kinds
of search expressions instead of simple words:
- 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).
- alumi*m
- This query matches pages that contain at least one word
beginning with alumi and ending with m.
In practise, it will
alumi*m will find matches for both aluminum and the British English
aluminium.
Thus the *-notation
is also useful for searching for words which may have
variant spellings.
However, there are some
restrictions
on the use of asterisks.
Very often the query result contains much more matches than you can
reasonably scan through. Therefore you might wish to
apply a new query on the result of a previous query, by using
words that exclude irrelevant items. This is not supported, but you
achieve the same effect by editing the line containing
the previous query - typically, by appending new words to it - and
then submitting the modified query.
This way you will iteratively perform queries until
you find useful information, as the following examples show.
Examples of Simple Queries
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 Asia.
- 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!
Advanced usage of AltaVista
Simple Query and Advanced Query
AltaVista provides two different search interfaces (search screens),
Simple Query and Advanced Query.
You can do quite a lot of useful and even
sophisticated searches with Simple Query.
However, Advanced Query offers more functionality;
on the other hand it is somewhat more tedious to use.
It is advisable that you learn to use both interfaces.
In Simple Query, you basically type a sequence of words, possibly
preceded by special keywords and possibly containing wildcards
(asterisks). In Advanced Query, you basically type
a Boolean search expression containing keywords AND
,
OR
, NEAR
, and NOT
.
Internally, Simple Query is implemented so that a Boolean search
expression is constructed "behind the scenes" and then invisibly
passed to Advanced Query. Thus, Advanced Query is technically
the basic query, and Simple Query is a useful simplified interface to it.
The
AltaVista main page
contains the Simple Query interface.
You can switch to Advanced Query
just by following the link labelled Advanced
.
Similarly,
you can switch from Advanced to Simple Query
by following the link labelled Simple
.
Using Advanced Query
Basics
You must use the binary operators
AND,
OR, NEAR, and the unary operator
NOT
to combine words and phrases.
If you just type two consecutive words in Advanced Query, there will be no
implied AND or OR operator between them. Instead the query will search
for only those documents in which that particular pair of consecutive
words occurs. This is quite different from what two consecutive words
mean in Simple Query!
Advanced Query also differs from Simple Query so that
by default Advanced Query returns an unordered
set of matches. In order to get some ranking you must
use the type-in field labelled Results Ranking Criteria
to enter words or phrases that will determine the
ranking.
The syntax of the operators
The operators can also be written in lower-case:
and, or, not,
near.
Alternatively, you can use the symbols
& for AND,
| for OR,
! for NOT,
and ~ for NEAR.
If you need to use any of these words as search words in a query,
you must place them in quotes, eg "near".
Using the operators
AND
, OR
, and
NEAR
are binary operators, whereas
NOT
is unary.
- kayak AND "San Juan Islands"
- The operator AND ensures that both
are present in the resulting documents. The operator AND
binds less tightly than juxtaposition.
- "Digital Equipment Corporation" OR DEC
- The operator OR ensures that at least one
is present in the resulting documents. The operator OR
binds less tightly than the operator AND.
- Louis NEAR Monier
- The operator NEAR ensures that both are
within ten words of each other
in the resulting documents. The operator NEAR
binds less tightly than the operator NOT
and associates to the left.
This query matches Louis Monier, Louis M. Monier
and Monier, Louis.
- vegetable AND NOT "brussel sprouts"
- The operator NOT is used to exclude words or phrases from a query.
The operator NOT binds less tightly than the operator OR .
This query is equivalent to vegetable and (not "brussel sprouts").
Do not use vegetable NOT "brussel sprouts";
this query is syntactically illegal.
You are allowed to use parentheses to group search expressions; in fact
it's recommended as less confusing.
Examples showing the importance of parentheses
- gold or silver and platinum
gold or (silver and platinum)
(gold or silver) and platinum
- The first two queries are equivalent.
They return documents containing
both silver and platinum, together with documents containing gold.
- If you want the search to find documents containing platinum and,
in addition, in the same document, either gold or silver, you must use
the third query pattern.
- not gold and silver
(not gold) and silver
not (gold and silver)
- The first two queries are equivalent.
They return documents containing
silver but not gold.
- If you want the search to eliminate documents that contain both gold
and silver, you must use the third query pattern.
- gold near silver and platinum
(gold near silver) and platinum
(gold near silver) and (gold near platinum)
- The first two queries are equivalent.
They return documents containing
gold located close to silver, and in addition, in the same document, the word platinum.
- If you want the search to find documents containing gold located close to
silver and, in addition, in the same document, gold close to platinum, you must use the third query pattern.
- not gold near silver
not (gold near silver)
silver and not (gold near silver)
- The first two
queries are equivalent.
They eliminate from the search all documents containing
silver located close to gold.
- If you want the search to find documents containing silver but want to eliminate those
that contain gold
located close to silver,
you must use the third query pattern.
- gold near silver or platinum
(gold near silver) or platinum
- The two queries above are equivalent. They find documents containing gold
located close to silver, together with documents containing platinum.
- gold near (silver or platinum)
(gold near silver) or (gold near platinum)
- The two queries above are equivalent. They find documents containing gold
located close to silver, together with documents containing gold
located close to platinum.
Constraining searches
It is possible to restrict searches to certain portions of documents by
using the following syntax. The keyword (link, title, image,...) should be
in lower-case, and immediately followed by a colon.
Constraining searches in Web pages:
- anchor:click-here
- Matches pages with the phrase click here in the text
of a hyperlink.
- applet:NervousText
- Matches pages containing the name of the Java applet class found in
an applet tag; in this case, NervousText.
- host:digital.com
- Matches pages with the phrase digital.com in the host name of
the Web server.
- image:comet.jpg
- Matches pages with comet.jpg in an image tag.
- link:thomas.gov
- Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with
thomas.gov in its URL.
- text:algol68
- Matches pages that contain the word algol68 in any part of
the visible text of a page.
(ie, the word is not in a link or an image, for example.)
- title:"The Wall Street Journal"
- Matches pages with the phrase The Wall Street Journal
in the title.
- url:home.html
- Matches pages with the words home and html
together in the page's URL. Equivalent to url:"home html".
Constraining searches in Usenet news articles
Please notice that these constraints can be used when
searching from Usenet news:
- from:napoleon@elba.com
- Matches news articles with the words napoleon@elba.com
in the From: field.
- subject:"for sale"
- Matches news articles with the phrase for sale in the
Subject: field.
- You can combine this with a word or phrase. For example,
subject:"for sale" "victorian chamber pots".
- newsgroups:rec.humor
- Matches news articles posted (or crossposted) in news groups
with rec.humor in the name.
- summary:invest*
- Matches news articles with the word invest,
investment, investiture, etc., in the summary.
- keywords:NASA
- Matches news articles with the word NASA in all caps
in the keyword list.
Useful tips
Find all links to your site, excluding pages from your own site
In Simple Query:
+link:http://my.site.com/ -url:http://my.site.com/
Alternatively, in Advanced Query:
link:http://my.site.com/ AND NOT url:http://my.site.com/
To speed up the search, you can leave out the very common words
http and com.
Find someone
The person you want to find could be listed as
Jane Smith,
"Jane L. Smith," or
"Smith, Jane L."
Therefore,
use the proximity operator in the Advanced Query: Jane NEAR Smith.
Use AltaVista as a spelling or usage checker
Is it CDROM or CD-ROM?
Make a search for both words, and compare the word count:
CD-ROM wins.
Use AltaVista to extract information from Usenet news
You can tell AltaVista to
search from Usenet news instead of the Web.
You can
use the newsgroups: keyword
to restrict the queries to named groups.
In the Advanced Query you can select a range of dates.
And of course you can
use the search capabilities to exclude certain authors or newsgroups, or to favor
certain topics.
Bookmark a page with certain options enabled
- Start from our home page
- select the options you are interested in, such as news, return format,
text-only version
- make an empty query with nothing in the text input window, but hit SUBMIT
nevertheless
- save the returned page in a bookmark
You can restore your favorite options
by simply retrieving this URL from your bookmarks.
Quick access to AltaVista
If you use AltaVista often and would you like to access it even faster,
you can
simply cut the following paragraph of HTML and paste it to
your WWW document:
<FORM method=GET action="http://altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query">
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=pg VALUE=q>
<B>Search <SELECT NAME=what>
<OPTION VALUE=web SELECTED>the Web
<OPTION VALUE=news>Usenet
</SELECT>
and Display the Results <SELECT NAME=fmt>
<OPTION VALUE="" SELECTED>in Standard Form
<OPTION VALUE=c>in Compact Form
<OPTION VALUE=d>in Detailed Form
</SELECT></B><BR>
<INPUT NAME=q size=55 maxlength=200 VALUE="">
<INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE=Submit>
</FORM>
The result:
Problems in using AltaVista?
I know a page on the Web that matches my query, but
AltaVista did not find it. Why not?
There are many reasons why AltaVista might not find a page that is in
fact on the Web.
- The page you are looking for is new. AltaVista is constantly
searching the Web for new pages to add to its index, but it is
likely that it will not find a brand new page (or new version of an
old page) for a few days.
- The page is behind a gateway or firewall. Some Web pages
are on corporate servers that are not publicly accessible, and AltaVista
does not attempt to access them. Likewise, any pages that require
additional protocol beyond following a hyperlink (e.g. that require
filling out a form, or registering, or providing a password, etc.)
are not indexed.
- Some servers specifically request that they not be visited by
automated systems (called robots in the parlance), and
AltaVista respects that request.
- The page may be unreachable by a chain of hyperlinks from the
main body of the Web. AltaVista starts with a few thousand known Web
documents, and follows chains of hyperlinks to find all of the
others.
Some documents, however, while technically on the Web (i.e. available
from some Web server and retrievable through the right URL), have no
hyperlinks pointing to them from the main body of the Web. A set of
Web documents that have hyperlinks to each other and hyperlinks
outward, but that have no hyperlinks into them from the rest of the
Web, cannot be found automatically by AltaVista.
- Sometimes AltaVista knows of the existence of a page because it
has found a hyperlink to it, but every time it tries to retrieve the page
to index it, the connection times out. This might indicate heavy
congestion at the server or the server not being online at that
moment.
AltaVista found some documents that do not match my query. Why?
AltaVista indexes the contents of a
document as of the day it finds it. It is possible that the owner
of the document has made some modifications since AltaVista retrieved
and indexed it. Even though the original document matched the
query, the new version might not. Eventually AltaVista will get
around to retrieving the page again and indexing it on the basis
of its new content.
In our experience, however, when AltaVista finds a document that does
not appear to match the query, the most likely explanation is that
it does indeed match, but in some way that is not very obvious. For
example:
AltaVista found a page I wanted to look at, but when I
attempted to retrieve it, I got an error. Why?
This can occur when the status of the page, or the server it is
on, has changed since AltaVista last retrieved and indexed it.
- The page may have been renamed or removed by the owner.
- The server containing the page that the user is trying to view
may be down at the moment.
- Access restrictions may have been introduced at the server since
AltaVista retrieved the page.
- The server containing the page may be so overloaded that attempts to connect to it
time out.
It is also possible that your own internetworking infrastructure
(routing tables, DNS service, security policies, proxies, and browser
configuration), prevents
you from making a connection to the server. The particular error
message you get will give you more information.
Additional information about AltaVista
Detailed description of the AltaVista screens
The initial screen
The following notes basically relate to the case of
using a graphical WWW browser (such as Netscape).
You can use AltaVista with a text-only browser (such as Lynx), too,
but the screen looks different; in that case you may wish to select
the link Text-Only
to get an interface which is especially
designed for the purpose.
The initial screen, ie the Alta Vista main page at
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
contains the following:
- The icon line:
-
- A large icon with the text
AltaVista Search OnSite Knowleadge
.
It is a link to information about the AltaVista project and
the software, hardware, and people behind it as well as
citations of statements about AltaVista.
- An icon with the text
Advanced
.
It is a link to the
Advanced Query interface.
- An icon with the text
Simple
.
It is just a link to the initial screen itself, but it appears
for the sake of uniformity (since the same link exists in the same
place on other screens).
- An icon with the text
Private eXtensions Products
.
It is a link to notes about software for indexing
information on intranets or private computers.
- An icon with the text
Help
.
It is a link to on-line help of AltaVista
Simple Query. Notice that when have
the Advanced Query screen, this icon is a link to the corresponding
on-line help for Advanced Query.
-
The search options line:
-
- The word
Search
followed by a pull-down menu
from which you select whether you require search from Web pages or
from Usenet news articles.
(There is no direct way to search from both at the same time, but
you can of course do the same search twice, with
different Search
selection. Notice that
some article posted to Usenet news also appears on Web pages
since they were separately transferred to the Web.)
- The words
Display the Results
followed by a pull-down menu
from which you select the desired form of output.
The standard (default) form consists of a few lines of descriptions and
excerpts for each document.
The compact form has just one line of information per document.
The detailed form is currently similar to the standard form.
-
The search line:
-
- The input area.
- The
Submit
button.
-
The tip line:
-
A short randomly chosen tip intended to help in using
AltaVista more efficiently.
-
Lines containing information about AltaVista:
-
A few lines of description of AltaVista,
with some links to more detailed information.
- Miscellaneous links:
-
-
Surprise
-
-
Legal
-
-
FAQ
-
-
Add URL
-
-
Feedback
-
-
Text-Only
-
-
AltaVista Software
-
- The copyright notice:
-
A legal notice, containing a link to information about the copyright owner.
Notes to WWW document authors and maintainers
In the absence of any other information, AltaVista will index all words
in your document (except for comments), and will use the first few words
of the document as a short abstract.
You should
pay attention to the very beginning of your document, using
descriptive words in the title and first heading.
The document will look more interesting, and
due to the AltaVista ranking rules
people's queries will find it more easily.
In addition, it is possible for you to control
- how your page is indexed and
- what the description of your document is (in reports from
AltaVista queries)
by using the META
tag to specify
additional keywords to index, or a short description, or both.
Let's suppose your page contains:
<META name="description"
content="We specialize in grooming pink poodles.">
<META name="keywords" content="pet grooming, Palo Alto, dog">
AltaVista will then do two things:
- It will index both fields as words,
so a search on either poodles or dog will match.
- It will return the description with the URL.
In other words, instead of showing the first couple of
lines of the page, a match will look like the following:
- Pink Poodles Inc
- We specialize in grooming pink poodles.
http://pink.poodle.org/ - size 3k - 29 Feb 96
AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters.
If you have important documents which you would like others to find,
you can specifically ask AltaVista to add the your document
into its database. This can be done rather easily
through the Add URL
link on the AltaVista
initial screen.
How searches work
To simplify the description that follows, we refer to the type-in field labelled
Selection Criteria
as the search field, and that labelled Results Ranking Criteria as
the ranking field.
Simple Queries and Advanced Queries are different interfaces to the same search engine.
This being true, you might be surprised that, under certain conditions, apparently identical
queries can
produce slightly different results,
depending on whether you submit them as Simple or Advanced Queries.
Compare, for example, a one-word Simple Query, say plato, with
the same word submitted as an Advanced Query, but
with no ranking specified. More specifically, this latter query has
plato in the search field and nothing in the ranking field.
Each of the two queries produces "about 20000" documents,
but the ranking is different in each case.
The explanation for the difference in ranking is rather complex, but briefly, AltaVista
implements Simple Queries as Advanced Queries.
More specifically, a Simple Query gets transformed into a boolean expression together
with a set of words to rank the results.
In the example above, AltaVista will implement the
Simple Query consisting of the one word, plato as
an Advanced Query with nothing in the search field, but plato in the ranking field.
Recall that in this example, the Advanced Query had plato in the search field
and nothing in the ranking field; in other words, the two queries were actually not
identical, and hence the different rankings.
If you submit a different Advanced Query, this time with plato in both the search
field and
the ranking field, the rankings of the documents matched will also be identical to those
produced by the Simple Query for
plato.
To sum up, all three of the following queries produce the same matches and in the same
ranking order.
Type of Query fields Query word
============================================================
Simple search only plato
------------------------------------------------------------
Advanced search ---
ranking plato
------------------------------------------------------------
Advanced search plato
ranking plato
------------------------------------------------------------
The following query will give you the same matches as for the queries above, but in no
particular ranking order.
Type of Query fields Query word
============================================================
Advanced search plato
ranking ----
------------------------------------------------------------
Ranking the results of queries
Ranking results of Simple Queries
For Simple Queries,
AltaVista will rank the results based on a scoring algorithm; documents with a
higher score appear at the head of the ranking list.
A document has a higher score if the following hold:
- the query words or phrases are found in the first few words
of the document (for example,
in the title of a Web page or in the headers of Usenet
news articles).
- the query words or phrases are found close to one another
in the document.
- the document contains more than one instance of the query word or phrase.
You are therefore likely to find what you want close to the head of the
resulting list of matches.
Ranking results of Advanced Queries
Use the type-in field labelled Results Ranking Criteria to enter words or phrases that will determine the ranking
of the search results. Recall from the previous section that ranking an Advanced Query
is equivalent to performing a Simple Query; the same scoring algorithm is used in both cases.
Documents with a high score will appear at the head of the list. High scores are assigned if
the selected ranking word appears in the first few words of the document (say, in the title of a Web page or in a header),
or if the document contains more than one instance of the ranking word.
Here's an example query, starting with no ranking specified.
Search field (gold near silver) and platinum
Ranking field
Result 2000 documents found and listed in no
particular order.
The 2000 documents found will contain the words gold located close to silver and
in addition in the same document, the word platinum.
If you now choose platinum to rank the search results, the query will produce the same
2000 documents, as you might expect, but ranked so that those with the highest scores for platinum
are placed at the head of the resulting list.
Search field (gold near silver) and platinum
Ranking field platinum
Result 2000 documents found, ranked so that those with
high scores for platinum are listed first.
You might want to proceed further. On the
assumption that documents containing matches for these metals also contain references to other metals,
you might want to check for occurrences of another. But notice what happens now to the search results.
Search field (gold near silver) and platinum
Ranking field palladium
Result 200 documents found
In this case, the Advanced Query has not
returned the 2000 documents that resulted from this search and reranked them so that
any with matches for palladium
are listed first. A second level of filtering has been applied to the search result;
1800 documents that do not contain matches for palladium
have been discarded.
In other words, when the ranking field is not empty, documents that contain none of the
words in the ranking field are discarded.
More about Words, Phrases, Capitalization,
Accents, and the *-Notation
Words
AltaVista treats every page on the Web and every article of Usenet
news as a sequence of words. A word in this context means any string
of letters and digits delimited either by punctuation and other
non-alphabetic characters (for example, &, %, $, /, #, _, ~), or by
white space (spaces, tabs, line ends, start of document, end of
document). To be a word, a string of alphanumerics does not have to be
spelled correctly or be found in any dictionary. All that is
required is that someone typed it as a single word in a Web page
or Usenet news article. Thus, the following are words if they
appear delimited in a document: HAL5000,
Gorbachevnik, 602e21, www, http,
EasierSaidThanDone, etc.
The following are all considered to be two words because the
internal punctuation separates them: don't,
digital.com, x-y, AT&T, 3.14159,
U.S., All'sFairInLoveAndWar.
Only the words in a document are significant to AltaVista. AltaVista
does not index punctuation or white space, so you can use
AltaVista to look only for words and phrases, not punctuation.
Phrases
A phrase is a string of words that are adjacent in a document,
although they may be separated by any amount of white space or
punctuation. They do not have to be grammatical in any human
language--they just have to occur in a document as an adjacent
sequence of words. Some examples:
- President of the U.S.A. (6-word phrase)
- http://www.election.digital.com (5-word phrase)
Since the punctuation and white space are insignificant to AltaVista
(except that they delimit words), the phrases above are
indistinguishable from the following variants:
- President of the U S A
- http www election digital com
There are two conventions for typing a phrase in a query. The best
way, leading to the least ambiguity, is to type the phrase as "a
sequence of words separated by spaces and surrounded by double
quotes". However, as an alternative, you may type the words of
the phrase with punctuation (and no white space) between each pair
of words. For example, these are all equivalent as queries:
- "President of the U S A"
- President-of-the-U-S-A
- President/of/the/U/S/A
- President.of.the.U-S-A
The first is the one we generally recommend. Be aware that
the punctuation characters
&
| ! and ~ have meaning in Advanced
queries, and * indicates the *-notation used in both Simple and Advanced
queries.
Capitalization
Capital letters are considered distinct from lower-case letters.
When a word is found in a Web page or a news article, its
case is preserved when it is stored in the index.
When you enter a word in a query, therefore, it is always safe, and
generally recommended, to type it all in lower-case, because
lower-case letters indicate a case-insensitive match. If you
type any capital letters, you force an exact case match on the
entire word.
Thus, the word turkey in a query will
match any of turkey, Turkey, tUrKeY or
TURKEY occurring in a document. But the capitalized word
Turkey in a query will match only Turkey in the
document, and not any of the other capitalization variants.
Accents
Accents are treated in the same way as capitalization.
An accented word used in a query forces an exact match on the entire word.
For example, if you use &eacut;el&eacut;ephant in a query, you will
match only the French spelling for the pachyderm.
However, if you do not care to enter accents in the search window
(something which is browser, platform, and keyboard-dependent), you can always
safely omit the accents, thereby matching both the French and English spellings.
The *-notation
To search for occurrences of any of a group of
words with a similar pattern, AltaVista provides the *-notation.
For example, you might want to search for matches of
sing, singer, singers,
singing. In this case,
place the *-notation at the end of the word whose inflections you want to
include in the search: sing*. But, a word of warning.
AltaVista will also match words lexically unrelated to your query word. So the query
sing* will also find matches for
singe, single, singular, and for foreign words such as
French singulier.
The *-notation cannot be used without restriction. To make such queries
computationally feasible, AltaVista requires that the * be used only
after at least three letters. The *-notation will match from zero
up to five additional letters in lower-case only.
Capital letters and digits
will not therefore be matched.
The *-notation can sometimes be useful for finding variant spellings:
for example,
cantalo* will find matches for cantaloup,
cantaloupe, cantalope, and their plurals.
But take care how you construct the query word. For example,
if you want to find matches for both color and colour, a query
of the form col*r is not the most efficient. This query will also
find matches for collector and atomic collider.
In this case, it is more efficient to submit the query colo*r,
which will find matches for both color and colour.
Finally, if your search using the *-notation finds too many matches,
AltaVista will ignore the query.
The query inte*, for example, produces the result,
Ignored inte*: 4292323
No documents match this query