What Was Once The Market Leader Is No More (altavista.com)

Member Name: darrenloud

Product:	altavista.com
Date:	05/08/01 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well respected, useful as a complete portal.

Disadvantages: Slow, full of advertising and dead links.

Altavista is managed by 'Altavista The Search Company', based in the US. For many years this search engine has been the number one throughout the world. It has evolved from a simple meta-engine to a portal of directories, databases and banks of graphics and the like.

Altavista could be described as a portal too, providing news and that sort of thing. I may sound like I love altavista, but I'm trying to give it a good hearing first.

I personally don't get on with altavista at all. It used to be my favorite, as did it with many millions of people. I have sinced moved on to Google. Altavista has grown out of what I would call an accurate seach engine into the catagory, money making machine providing no service of any use at all.

Everytime you make a search, you are always hit with at least three 'partner site' listings. These are useless and simply pay to be there. My other problem with it is that it's very out of date. The robots that index the sites don't update listings enough. Their database is full of dead links, and links that frankly have changed their description, etc.

The other major problem is its speed. I could make 5 searches on Google in the time it takes Altavista to do one. They seem to be still using the same hardware at their end as they were 5 years ago, not accomodating for how busy the internet has got in recent years.

My advice would be to use altavista only when you can't find what you are looking for with one of the other major engines. Google, in my opinion, is by far the best engine to search with out there.

Altavista receives about 10million hits a day, whereas Google receives around 40million (of which some are from yahoo!). I think these figures speak for themselves, i'll leave you to make your own mind up about it.

Summary: