Capital letters and digits will not therefore be matched. Possibly to modify search. Standard and detailed forms are the same. Alta Vista seems to be powerfull search engine. Possibility to limit searches to certain fields is an advance same as boolean and proximity operators.
Online manual is extensive.
Query structures are not limited, but in certain situations I have doubted performance in complex search statements. Harvesting program Scooter doesn't seem to index sites very deeply. In sometimes AltaVista drops pages from it's index and after a while they reappear. You can get different results from simultanious, exactly same searches. Mirror sites databases are different from the main site.