It has a different name and a different look, but it is basically Excite underneath. In Europe, Lycos provides the results in the same manner as Excite. AOL NetFind launched in March 1997. AltaVista is consistently one of the largest search engines on the web, in terms of pages indexed. Its comprehensive coverage and wide range of power searching commands makes it a particular favorite among researchers.
Advertisers can also pay to be listed higher within the service.
AltaVista opened in December 1995. If it fails to find a match within its own database, then it will provide matching web pages from various search engines. The service went into beta in mid-April 1997 and opened fully on June 1, 1997. Results from Ask Jeeves also appear within AltaVista. Direct Hit is a company that works with other search engines to refine their results.