Is AltaVista wacky on purpose?

[mightymid]

I wanted to see how well my site ranks in AV. So I did a search for my keywords, which yielded 4 pages of results (or 170 items).

I didn't find my site on page 1 of the results list, so I clicked on the link to page 2. It wasn't there either. So I clicked back to page 1....AND found that my site was now in the #1 position. Moreover, the results list had decreased to 2 pages and 61 items.

It's not a fluke; it happens nearly every time I do a search on AV. It happens frequently with Yahoo's search feature as well.

Why does this happen? Is there some basic resource for newbies on how search engines operate?

Thanks in advance,
midori

[seth_wilde]

I haven't been following AV very closely recently.. but, this usually happens because the SE is using serveral databases that they rotate (Something AV has been known to do)..

[heini]

Currently AV and ATW get merged on the frontend, see this message by one of the engineers:
[webmasterworld.com...]

So some inconsistencies are to be expected, I suppose.