Altavista Launches New Look

Online Now

[Brett_Tabke]

As mentioned earlier [webmasterworld.com], Altavista was suppose to launch it's new look next week.

It's here and online now.

Tour:
[altavista.com...]

[vitaplease]

"AltaVista refreshes 50% of the results daily" ?

what does that exactly mean?

For the rest thumbs up AV, your going the right direction.

[Shakil]

London - UK

New layout visible

still doubtful about getting any quality traffic from AV though.

Shak

[Macguru]

They seem to redirect from country. I get different defaults by country.
<added>The Prisma stuff smells like a Microsoft product.</added>

[edited by: Macguru at 9:58 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2002]

[vitaplease]

[uk.altavista.com...]

they still allow the asterisk wildcard as one of the few search engines

Colo*r would find documents that contain color and colour

[Macguru]

Is it enough for AV to get his very own forum back here?

[rbester]

Thumbs up for the new AltaVista look.

Two of my sites were completely crawled by Scooter two days ago. This is the first time Scooter crawls so many pages in any of my sites at once. Is there a chance that AltaVista is making improvements to their crawling depth and frequency as well?

[Mohamed_E]

> Is it enough for AV to get his very own forum back here?

Not until we see some real referrals! Right now AV gives me a whopping 1.53% of my SE referrals. It will take time for them to get new users.

[ken_b]

I like the new look. I moved up a lot since last nite too, did they update the serps?

[przero2]

AV seems to be on right track with SERPs looking relevant!

[Macguru]

>>did they update the serps?
I see it so ken_b.

Better algo for spammers. ;)

[john316]

If they got rid of this before the next results, they have something. Still leaves the sense of being "trapped".

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C'mon AV...do it right!

[zeus]

It looks great, but I have seen in some categories where before was 1.700.000 pages now 70.000 is it for good or are they in some kind of update.

zeus

I just took a look at my rankings and they realy suck now before I was no.1 many main keywords, but now on on main keyword and serps are not that good.

Ohh the serps are bad, after more searches, its a shame after the new look, that they diddent get those paid listing and text ads at the bottom of the site.

[edited by: zeus at 10:59 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2002]

[hurlimann]

No impressed with the algo.

Spam out: Spam in.

We lost a very very small % ground on our main keywords. I have no problems with this as we probably had better positions than was warrented.

[rbester]

They have joined Google and FAST in crawling Adobe PDF files as well. Next to the PDF results you'll see the "Download PDF Reader" link.

The number of inbound links of one of my sites increased from 16 to over 100. They have definitely added many more pages to their database.

[SlyOldDog]

Yes. Can't say much for the results if our old domain is tops. We stoped updating it a long while ago.

[makemetop]

A great improvement - fast and much cleaner. I notice that they have 'Refreshed in the past 48 hours' against a number of listings. The equivalent of a 'fresh' tag.

Now, if only they/we can get the word out, AV could make a come-back.

[Grumpus]

All I can say is - what a mess that new AV is. Especially in the directory. They're using looksmart, right? I've got 230+ pages in that directory and can't find one in a directory search at AV. THEN, if you do a directory search and click on the category, it gives you a nice blue 404.

Main Serps are no fresher - same old stale stuff from my site that's been in there since summertime and before.

Not impressive in the least.

G.

[chiyo]

I sure hope this is not the new algo. Relevance in niche searches is abysmal.

AV still redirects Malaysians to AV UK! And now it dosent even let give us a link to go to the US interface, even though clicking on "Worldwide" does give us (I think on a quick check), the us database results. Why in the world does AV think Malaysians need to be redirected to the UK? They became independent more than 30 years ago, and their Prime Minister still exhorts Malaysians to "Buy British last"!

To me Looksmart is a major influence. Our few pages that were picked up by LS editors over the past 5 years and are very minor get top ranking over the home pages for the home pages keywords.

Clutter? I agree with John316. The promise of a cleaner interface has not been delivered. Their traditional commercial shopping mall brand continues. And their smarty pants "clustering" just does not make up for it.

And those little advertising boxes on the right? They just remind me there IS a Google, and make me itch to get back there.]

News2 didnt offer any matches to the 3 sets of keywords i tried that in Google News offer hundreds of relevant on target links.

I will certainly check back till they "settle", but at present it aint looking good.

Disappointed?... yep. I was really hoping they could do enuff to get back their own forum. At the moment the major change I see is the new logo.

Opportunity lost? OK II'd reserve my last opinions until a week or two after their official launch... But at the moment, despite all their press release spin AV still don't get it

[rfgdxm1]

The new look is OK, but the algo they are using is craptastic. The relevance of the Altavista algo on searches I did was about as bad as it gets for a search engine. Even Wisenut is doing a better job.

[john316]

The algo looks really good (for consumer/commercial stuff), it's just that they shouldn't half-step on the interface...no one needs an invitation to play poker on every click.

[edited by: john316 at 2:36 am (utc) on Nov. 10, 2002]

[Macguru]

A first for me. I saw a functional form at the end of sponsered results.

[john316]

Yep...saw a form here as well, also ebay logos in the regular serps..anyone know how they do that (the logo)?

[Macguru]

I believe that is the Listing enhancement service. It's been up there for a while.

altavista.com/web/listing_enhancements

[rmccollom]

"I certainly like the new SERPS."

Me too! Looks a lot like the Fast results (on the terms I search).

[chiyo]

yep,, a search for "[insert non US country] business" checking "worldwide" rather than "UK" results in a logo for the 8th listing.. "walmart" Does Walmart exist outside the US?

[chiyo]

"Me too! Looks a lot like the Fast results (on the terms I search)."

Not for me.. on wide variety of niche searches in the areas of business, jazz, politics, and professions, not even close to Fast.

It sounds so far from what I read the algo is pretty good at commercial searches though.

[Macguru]

If Canada is still a sovereign country ( :) ) yes, we have Wallmart too.

>>Looks a lot like the Fast results

Fast show me about 4 times more results than AV.

[rmccollom]

Well, ok, I'm looking at commercial services in my little niche and the results are amazingling similar.

[rubble88]

The AV tour [altavista.com] states that "AltaVista refreshes 50% of the results daily."

From what I've learned this DOES NOT MEAN that the company is recrawling and refreshing half of its database each day.

To be more precise it means that 50% of the "most popular pages" will be recrawled and refreshed at this 50% rate.