AltaVista bafflement - "santa fe" "Santa Fe"

[Miriam Bobkoff]

AltaVista is the search engine I use all the time, and the one I teach to
library patrons, because I thought I knew what it does. The following
behavior really confuses me. Any explanations gratefully accepted.

"santa fe" yields only 9 hits
with caps, "Santa Fe" yields 148103 hits

Surely this is backwards from normal AltaVista behavior. As the help file
says, "When in doubt, use lowercase text in your searches. When you use
lowercase text, the search service finds both upper and lowercase results."

"santa fe poetry broadside"  no hits
"Santa Fe Poetry Broadside"  58 hits
+"santa fe" +"poetry broadside"  76 hits
+"Santa Fe" +"Poetry Broadside"  38 hits

Thanks very much for any clues. This must be something obvious that I should
already know, but I don't.

Miriam Bobkoff                        mbobkoff at ci.santa-fe.nm.us
Santa Fe Public Library
145 Washington Avenue
Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 984-6832     The Library's Page  http://www.ci.santa-fe.nm.us/sfpl/