I believe AltaVista to be the better of all the search engines I have studied. It gives you access to over 31 million web pages (found on over 627,000 servers), over 4 million articles from 14,000 Usenet news groups. AltaVista is accessed over 31 million times per week.

1. Information Management:

The first step is to know what information you want to find, and sticking to it. This step is primary to all search engines. Otherwise, you can find yourself looking at something totally irrelevant, after hours have past and you still haven't found what you are looking for.

The second step is to best word the information so as to come up with the best possible results. A search engine can only work with what you give it. The key here is to be as specific as possible. If you want to find out information on black and white photography development, don't just write "photography", you want to write the whole lot, that way, your results will be more accurate and less plentiful.

The third step is writing the keyword(s) in a manner that the search engine will recognise. This is known as the sytnax, and will vary from engine to engine, but these first three steps are central to any search engine.

All this information so far speaks generally about any search engine, they are the steps you should take before you even touch the computer. The information below is specific to Infoseek.

2. AltaVista Syntax:

The syntax for AltaVista is really not much different to a lot of other search engines, this makes sence considering that many other engines use AltaVista as their central database. As a general rule, the following syntax applies:

• When searching for a phrase (a set of words that must appear together eg: Tourist sites in America) you must enclose the phrase in quotation marks ("...").The other way to do this is to seperate the words using semicolons (eg: ....;....;....;).
  
• You are able to specify sites containing two or more words/phrases, simply by using the + sign (eg: frogs +australia). You can also specify to search for sites without a centain word/phrase, simply by using the - sign (eg: frogs +australia -"tree frogs").

• If you are searching for a certain topic, and you want to also search for a varity of spelling (or for plural use etc.) you can use a wildcard (the "*" symbol). (eg: searching for "fish*" will also find matches for fishing, fisheries, fisherman etc.).
  

3. Reading Your Results:

Once again, reading your results using the AltaVista search engine is very much the same as with any other search engine. When the results come back, they are put in order from what AltaVista considers to be the closest match to what you are looking for first, the next closest match next, and so on.

Each match has a short description of what you will find at the site (sometimes this description doesn't sound like anything that would help you, but remember that AltaVista doesn't only search the summary, it searches the site, so it might be a good idea to check it out still, especially if it is near the top of your search results), a percentage ranking of how closely AltaVista thinks it matches your initial search words, a clickable link to the site, and usually an address so you know where you are heading.

If your results are not what you are looking for, or are too numerous, you are able to redo or refine your search at the bottom of the results page. You can re-search the entire WWW if your results were totally wrong, or you can search just your search results to narrow down the list.

• Ranking search results: The search results are ranked on the following:

• Where the query word(s)/phrase(s) are found in the site (eg: If the're found near the top or even in the heading, the get a high ranking).
  
• How close together numerous matches of the word(s)/phrase(s) (ie: Close together means a higher ranking).
  
• How many times the search word(s)/phrase(s) are mentioned in the site (ie: the more times, the higher the rank).

• Using the META tag: Normally, when AltaVista indexes a site, it will use the first few words in the document as a short summary. You can actually add a specific summary by using the META tag in the HTML of the site. In this tag you can actaully add keywords which, when someone searches for that specific keyword, they will come up with your site in their search results.

Now you should have a pretty good understanding of how AltaVista works. Why not give it a try. Click here to take you to the AltaVista search page. If you still have problems, try the AltaVista Help Page.