Each item in the Search Results for categories includes the Web site's category, so you can continue searching within the Web directory. Executive Branch Find sites about William Jefferson Clinton. The AltaVista Directory is created and maintained by professional LookSmart editors, who evaluate Web sites and place them into categories. You get the benefit of their judgment that the Web sites are useful and relevant. While the AltaVista Web Directory currently contains more than two million Web sites, it covers a relatively small percentage of the World Wide Web.
Editors add fresh content daily and remove dead links.
AltaVista Search enables you to search for words or phrases in the text of Web sites throughout the World Wide Web. The AltaVista Search engine currently includes an estimated 90 percent of all Web sites in its huge index. The index is created by automatic programs called crawlers that move systematically through the Web and return the entire text of each site it finds. Using patented algorithms, AltaVista Search ranks the results to present the most relevant sites first. A typical search might find hundreds of thousands of Web sites and present you with the most relevant 200 Web addresses.