Probably the most powerful Web search engine available, Alta Vista is a great demonstration of what great hardware and software Digital makes. However, more than an advertisement, Alta Vista is a very complete and robust tool which boasts one of the largest indexed databases available. Casual users can slap down a few words to generate a simple query, but power users will appreciate the flexibility of the advanced search interface. Organization Alta Vista provides 2 complete search interfaces, each of which can search across indexed Web pages or recent Usenet news articles. The advanced interface supports full Boolean and Proximity searching, using paretheses to control nesting of arbitrarily complex criteria.
Users can also specify a the earliest or latest modification date for matching documents.
Neither search page will automatically truncate a keyword, nor do they accept Regular Expressions. There are no controls to specify the number of matches displayed on the output page, but each page contains a link to the next set of 10 matches. Documents are sorted on the input keywords, but the advanced form let's the user enter additional words on which the documents will be sorted. Using the search engine requires an HTML-forms capable browser. Indexed documents are not restricted by content or focus.