Altavista

You can find it at http://www.altavista.com.

This is the one of largest search engine in terms of the number of pages that it indexes and seems to be one of the most popular. Altavista is reputed to have powerful search commands.

You the option to search pages that are from the UK only or you can search the whole web.

AltaVista searches web pages, images, MP3/audio, video, the AltaVista Directory, news, and shopping. Any search gets results from all of these sources and lists the information it finds on a results page. Search lists the most relevant documents first up to a maximum of 200 sites. You can restrict the search to pages in a specific language and turn on a family filter that tries to exclude material that may not be suitable for people under 18.

Altavista also prompts for related searches to help you narrow in on what you are looking for. Do a search and then look just below the search box on the results page:

For example, a search for "travel" brings up related queries such as "travel agency" and "air travel". These suggestions are based on searches conducted by other users with terminology similar to your search terms. Click on any link to start a new search using those terms. If your search query is very specific, there may not be any related searches.

If you do a search and feel that have too many results, you might want to narrow down the set of matches you've already generated. Altavista make this easy through a search within feature. Enter your new text and check the “Search within these results” box to search only those pages returned by your original search:

If you find a web page in the search results that was exactly what you were looking for, you can look for similar pages to one you like. Click on the “Related pages” option that appears at the bottom of each summary of page on the results list.

AltaVista the displays pages that it thinks are similar to the listed Web site. These related pages include pages linked to the listed site as well as other pages determined by proprietary algorithms.

Altavista clusters search results so that you don’t search and find that the top results all seem to come from one site. This means that you get more variety and a better chance of quickly finding something of interest. If your search matches more than one page on a site, you can choose to see more pages from any site by clicking on the "More pages from this site" option that appears at the end of each page listing.

AltaVista also offers semi-automatic phrase searching. This can be helpful because a phrase search often yields more relevant results than an ordinary search. AltaVista tries to extract phrases from the terms you enter. It has a huge dictionary of common phrases. When you search, it checks the dictionary to see if your search request contains any phrases that it recognizes. If so, then it will perform a phrase search automatically. If not, then it will default to a normal search.

The Customize Settings option allows you choose the information you want to appear in lists of results. For example, the page’s url, description, date last modifed.

In Advanced Search, you can indicate that you want to see more than one page per site in the results list.

Altavista also has a directory listing from LookSmart. You can browse the entire AltaVista directory from the home page. Simply start from any topic listed in "Categories" on the left-hand side of the home page below the search box.