You can then browse many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of sites. To ask AltaVista to rank these sites by relevance, be sure to include a word or phrase in the Sort box. Otherwise, the sites are listed in a random order. You can use the same phrase in the Sort box as in the Search box or enter a different word or phrase. They also regularly attempt to re-visit sites found on previous crawls.
All search engines manage to find only a portion of the millions and millions of Web pages.
A Webmaster can ensure that a search engine finds a site by submitting the Web address directly. AltaVista search engines collect all the text on Web pages as well as information in the HTML coding about the Web page, links to and from the page, and information from the server hosting the Web page. Remember this evaluation is all done by software programs following programmed commands, not by people. AltaVista Search ranks sites automatically. The search engine returns an approximation of the number of Web sites matching your query, which may change when you go from page to page.