Liane - 3:53 pm on Jan 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

Its a good question. They have made some efforts recently with a new look, "fresh" indexing and much improved SERPS, in the unpaid listings, but because of their insistence in promoting mainly sponsored ads all over the top of the page including this "Prisma" thing which is more of the same ... I sincerely doubt it. I just checked one of my keywords and they had three paid listing above the unpaid listings with 6 more down the right hand side. Its too much!

Surfers may as well just go to Overture if they want a list of ads. Alta Vista can't be everything to everyone, which (it appears) they are trying to do. They need to make a decision to be either a first rate search engine or a PPC engine.

Their pages are far too busy. Lazy people like myself who don't like having to scroll to find unpaid search results will likely just stick with Google. Google has them beat hands down in that regard. Clean up the pages ... make it easy to find what you are looking for without a lot of distracting things messing up the page and then maybe they stand a chance, who knows?