Article 32741 of dec.notes.networking.internet_tools:
Title: Excited by AltaVista?

    Apologies if this is heresy, but is AltaVista really better?  I
    know it has lots of data and is very fast but it never seems as
    good as Excite (www.excite.com) at actually finding something
    useful.  Here are some examples:

    1.	I want to find details of VB custom controls which implement
        outline list boxes.  I use the search string:

            visual basic custom control listbox outline

        Of the 8 returned initially by AltaVista, 2 are in German, 2
        refer to Delphi, 1 to FoxPro, 1 to something called Rivet, 1
        to an internet utility called Surfer Central and 1 to
        resource bytes used by various VB controls.  None of these
        are any use whatsoever.

        Of the 10 returned by Excite, all are directly related to
        VB and at least 5 look promising for further investigation.

    2.	I want to learn to play the piano.  I type:

    	    teach yourself piano

        AltaVista returns a couple of useful links but Excite
        returns a link to "The Piano Education Page - Learning to
        Play the Piano", which is very comprehensive.

    3.	I want to find the Banana Labels Web pages.  I type:

            banana labels

        Excite returns as its first link, "Ilkka Havukkala's Banana
        Label WWW page", which is where its at.  AltaVista has this
        as link no. 5 on the second page.

    Some of these examples are trivial but I seem to find all the
    time that Excite "knows" better than AltaVista what I am looking
    for.  The reason may be that Excite lists first the pages
    where the search text is the subject of the page itself and not
    a link to the page.  An example of this is the Banana Label
    page.  AltaVista's first link is a page that links to the Banana
    Label page.  Excite's first link is the page itself.

    As the Web gets bigger, it will become more important that
    search engines prioritise the many thousands of entries they are
    likely to find for most searches.  At the moment, everyone is
    impressed by the amount of data indexed.  As soon as people find
    that this means thousands of matches for each search, they are
    going to look for something more sophisticated.  I hope
    AltaVista will provide it.

    Julian