Study these tips for conducting searches using AltaVista.

Tip 1. Don’t use simple keywords. Typing in the word football is unlikely to help you to find information on your favourite football team. Unless special operators are included, AltaVista assumes the default¹ operator is OR. If, for example, the search query is American football, AltaVista will look for documents containing either American or football although it will list higher those documents which contain both.

Tip 2. AltaVista is specifically case sensitive. If you specify apple as your search term, AltaVista will return matches for apple, Apple and APPLE.

Tip 3. AltaVista supports natural language queries². If you really aren’t sure where to start looking, try typing a natural language query in the search box. The question Where can I find pages about digital cameras? will find a number of answers but at least it will give you some idea of where to start.

Tip 4. Try using phrase searching. This iswhere you place quotation marks around your search term, e.g. “alternative medicine”. This will search for all documents where these two words appear as a phrase.

Tip 5. Attaching a “+” to a word is a way of narrowing your search. It means that word must be included in your search. For example, if you were looking for information on cancer research, use +cancer +research instead of just cancer.

Tip 6. Attaching a “–“ to a word or using NOT is another way of narrowing your search. This excludes the search item following the word NOT or the “–” sign. For example, science NOT fiction or science -fiction will exclude sites in which these two words occur together.

Tip 7. Use brackets to group complex searches, for example: (cakes AND recipes) AND (chocolate OR ginger³) will find pages including cakes and recipes and either chocolate or ginger or both.

Tip 8. You can refine your search by doing a field search. Put the field, then a colon and then what you are looking for. For example, URL:UK +universities will find only British universities. title: “English language” will find only sites which contain this phrase in their titles.

Tip 9. AltaVista supports the use of wildcard searches. If you insert a * to the right of a partial word, say hydro*, it will find matches for all words beginning with hydro such as hydrocarbon and hydrofoil⁴. Wildcards can also be used to search for pages containing plurals of the search terms as well as to catch possible spelling variations, for example alumin*m will catch both aluminium (UK) and aluminum (US).

Tip 10. If you are looking for multimedia files then save yourself time by selecting images, audio or video with the radio buttons on AltaVista’s search box and then entering your search.

Notes

¹default /diˈfƆ:lt/ n – замовчування

²query /ˈkwiǝri/ n – запит, запитання

³ginger /ˈdʒindʒǝ/ n – імбир

⁴hydrofoil /ˈhaidrɜυfƆil/ n – судно ні підводних крилах