AltaVista
Executive Summary
As an assignment for our Business information technology class, we were required to choose a search engine and do an analysis piece on its features and functionality. After searching the web for a viable engine to analyze, I came to altavista. While there are many other interested and more interactive search engines available across the web, I choose to do Altavista because of its unique simplicity and history in the industry. In the paragraphs below, I will highlight some of the key search engine features, talk a bit about the performance quality, and then provide a recommendation on whether or not you should use the search engine as well as in what circumstances the search engine might be best used. Additionally, I have provided more in-depth analysis of the search engine. You can access this simply by browsing through the table after the executive summary.
Key Engine Features
While altavista may not be built on cool, unique features, it does boast simple features that can't be found in others. To start, altavisa has many of the normal features of your average search engine. It contains a web search, image search, and news search option. Additionally, below the search bar, altavista has teamed up with Yahoo! and provides their users with such features as Yahoo! answers, directory, shopping, travel, yellow pages, and people finder. By outsourcing these features on their site, altavista is able to focus on their core competence; providing a powerful web search tool.
Unlike many other search engines, altavista provides its search engine experience to many other countries around the world. When on the main page, in the upper right-hand corner, altavista website has an option that allows users to choose between over 20 countries whose internet space it allows you to search. This is useful for a number of reasons. The first, is that if you are from another country, you can search in that space to find results that you can understand, are useful, and that you can read. Second, if you are doing a project or assignment for a foreign language class, this site may be useful in the completion.
Finally, altavista offers a very useful and comprehensive custom query builder available in the "advance search" tab. Here, the builder clearly lays out what the user can search for without having to use the syntax that many other sites encourage the user to use. On top of the query builder, altavista also has a number of other unique search filters that allow the users the ultimate, customizable experience. I will dive deeper into these features in the tab below.
Performance Quality
Altavista provides a smooth and fast search experience. Since the site (as you can see by simply looking at it is very basic in design and functionality, they are able to focus on providing a smooth and enjoyable experience. Also, altavista continually returns many more results then even Google, who is the market share leader in the industry. When I typed in the simple search "Google" in both altavista and Google, they returned 5,600,000,000 and 592,000,000 respectively. This is a HUGE difference in the number of search results. Also, navigating between the features and filters in altavista is very easy and simple to use.
Recommendation
While altavista may not give the most entertaining experience in the industy, it definitely provides the features that allows you to get a search done. I may not recommend you to use this site when it comes to all searches (as other sites such as Google and Bing are easy to use and provide proven results), if you can't find a certain piece of information, I definitely recommend that you try out altavista. Also, altavista will prove useful when you are researching about other countries or other languages. Since I am not recommending the page to be immediately made your home page, I do encourage you to read my analysis and vist the altavista site to have a first hand look at what it has to offer.
Analysis of the AltaVista Search Engine
When breaking down a search engine there are a number of different areas outside of the user interface that you need to analyze in order to find the total overall usefulness of a web search tool. These areas include how often the information is updated, are the results returned quality/relevant, the effectiveness of queries within the engine, and how the results are presented to the end user. Below these points of analysis are listed.
Click on the links to read further about how AltaVista performs in each of these key categories.
| Category of Analysis | Description |
|---|---|
| Search Engine Interface | Looks at the quality of the experience and the responsiveness of the search engine |
| Searchable Information | How frequently is the information updated? |
| Subset of the Web | Opacity, quality of coverage, target |
| Web Search Queries | Is there good variety in the use of queries? Does it allow you to perform queries to sort information? |
| Search Results | Does the search engine return results relevant to what you are searching for? How is the information delivered? How is it formatted? This section also provides a comparison to the popular search engine: Google |
