For many people, searching the Internet has become a nightmare, thanks to the massive number of Web pages cluttering cyberspace. Finding the information you need is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack - it's more like looking for a needle in an entire corn field! Alta Vista, one of the most powerful Web search engines available, frequently returns more than 30,000 Web pages as the result of a search - sometimes even hundreds of thousands.
Luckily, Alta Vista's 'simple search' page has many hidden tricks that can be used to target your research more accurately and get just the information you need.
One of the simplest and most effective is to use the '+' and '-' operators in your searches. Prefixing any search word with '+' tells Alta Vista that the word MUST appear on a Web page to be considered a valid hit. Prefixing a word with '-' tells Alta Vista to exclude pages with that word.
For example, '+computing +history' will give you a list of all Web pages that contain both words. If you omitted the '+' from each word, Alta Vista would return all pages that contained either word - that's about 10,232,597 pages! Using the '+' operators cuts the number of results down to just 364,213 pages.
To refine your search further, you could type '+computing +history -apple -microsoft', which would remove any Web pages that mentioned Apple or Microsoft. In this example, the results list drops to 273,604.
To further narrow the search, put phrases or words that you think should remain together in quotes. Following from the previous example, writing the search as ' +'computer history' -apple -microsoft' would narrow the search down to just 995 pages.
At that point, it is possible to look at most of the documents matching the search criteria without it taking you several hours.