AltaVista bafflement

[Danny Sullivan]

I haven't looked into any specifics of what people have raised re: 
AltaVista, but I will do so. In the meantime, everyone should be aware 
that when you do a simple search, AltaVista kicks in with automatic 
phrase detection. This can do weird, strange and unexpected things to 
your query. See this article for more on how to know exactly what is 
going on:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/sereport/9902-avphrase.html

Also be aware that AltaVista seems to be in the midst of either rolling 
out a larger index or making other changes for a relaunch expected this 
summer. This is something I'll be covering more in a future newsletter. 
In the meantime, this is part of the reason why you may see screwy 
things. Just in part, of course -- AltaVista has a well known history 
now of failing to give accurate hit counts due to caching issues, 
failure to search deeply during busy times and just overall bugginess.

cheers,
danny

-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan 
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com