AltaVista's search engine http://www.altavista.com/ indexes more pages than any other search service, and it lets you search in flexible ways. However, it doesn't offer a directory you can search by category, and the quality of the search results may be disappointing because none of the pages are reviewed. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of pages indexed by AltaVista makes it a useful service when you're searching for pages about more obscure topics.

Type keywords in lowercase if you want to find both lower- and uppercase instances of the word. Use only uppercase letters when you want to limit the search to words that match the exact combination of lower- and uppercase you type.

Steps:

1. Type your keywords in the Search text box and click on the Submit button.
   • To find an exact phrase, enclose the words within double quotes “ ”.
   Example: The phrase “Grapes of Wrath” a search with multiple keywords, type a + (plus) in front of a word to find only Web pages that include the words, and a - (minus) sign to exclude pages containing the word.
   The word +Steinbeck restricts the search results to pages that contain the word Steinbeck.
   AltaVista returns 500 matching Web pages and lists the best matches first for the above search on +Steinbeck.
2. You can use the wildcard character * (asterisk) in simple searches to represent one or more characters in a keyword.
   • The keyword organi*ational ensures that AltaVista will include Web pages with both the British and American spelling of the word.
3. AltaVista displays the search results with pages that use both spellings of the word. The page from Australia would not have been returned if you had typed a “z” instead of “*”, they spell the word as organisational.
4. If you want to perform more complex searches, click on the Advanced Search button that appears at the top of each AltaVista page.
5. Enter the search criteria in the Selection Criteria box. In an advanced search, you have to use one of the special operators: AND, OR, NOT or NEAR. (In AltaVista you can type the operators in upper-or lowercase.)
   • Connect two keywords with AND if you want to find only Web pages that include both words (this is the same as preceding both words with a plus sign).
   • Connect two keywords with OR to find Web pages containing at least one of the keywords.
   • Precede a keyword with NOT to exclude Web pages that contain the keyword (this is the same as preceding a word with a minus sign).
   • Connect two keywords with NEAR when you want to find Web pages in which the keywords are within ten words of each other on a Web page.
6. You can also use parentheses ( ) to group search criteria together. Enter the following in the Selection Criteria box: volunteer AND ("animal assisted therapy" OR "AAT")
   • AltaVista will look for pages that contain the word volunteer and either the phrase animal assisted therapy or the abbreviation AAT.
7. If you want Web pages that contain particular keywords to be listed first, you can type the desired keywords in the Results Ranking Criteria box. Here the pages containing the phrase animal assisted therapy will be listed first. Then perform the search, click on the Submit Advanced Query button.
8. AltaVista displays these results: 53 pages matched the search criteria, and the pages containing the phrase animal assisted therapy are listed at the top.

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