AltaVista News Search Review

Last updated Jul. 12, 2023.
by Greg R.

AltaVista uses Moreover along with some other sources such as the New York Times for its searchable database of news resources, which consist of news available from public Web sites.

• Dates: Coverage goes back a year or more.
• Sources: Claims over 3,000 sources, from the Web sites covered by Moreover (which include major Web news sites as well as lesser known ones) along with the New York Times and Forbes and other news sources they crawl themselves.
• Sort: AltaVista defaults to a relevance sort but also offers a date sort as an option.
• Frequency: Stories appear to have updates of about an hour or so.
• Case Recognition: Searches are not case sensitive.
• Stop Words: There appear to be no stop words. Search results are available even for terms such as the, a, 1, etc.
• Truncation: The truncation symbol, an asterisk *, can be used for truncation of 0-5 extra characters. Use a second asterisk to get an additional 5 extra characters. This can be used as internal truncation or end truncation. A minimum of three characters before the truncation symbol is required.
• Boolean: The default operation is an AND. AltaVista's Boolean syntax of AND, OR, AND NOT, and nesting does work. The NEAR operator does as well. The - symbol can be used for AND NOT.
• Phrase: Phrase searching is available by using double quotes "like this" around a search phrase.