A phrase is any string of adjacent words. Capital letters in a search will force an exact case match on the entire word. For example, submitting a query for paRIS will search for matches of paRIS . Matches may be required or prohibited. Punctuation glues words into a phrase, just as quotes do.
Punctuation is treated as white space.
To find documents most relevant to what you need, construct your query as precisely as you can. Alta Vista ranks the documents found so that the ones matching the most words and phrases in the query are listed first. Even so, you might not find exactly what you want at the head of the list if your search is too general.