I have heard buzz from seasoned sourcers and recruiters that they still like to use Altavista in search. I was surprised by that, but, wanted to take a look and see what Altavista could offer.

Altavista was huge in 1997 and 1998. To put that in perspective for you, Google was in its infancy and AIRS was in its earliest beginnings. I have a millennial friend that would have been 14. What I remember about it was a huge search box where you could input the longest search string ever and there was no truncation. At the time it was highly advised to use Altavista to build search strings – because of the format and the ability to include so much information. So a typical string might look like the powerhouse below seeking any type of biographical document similar to a resume that I can think of, and includes multiple nested statements:

(url:resume OR title:resume OR url:cv OR title:cv OR url:vitae OR title:vitae OR url:profile OR title:profile OR url:bio OR title:bio OR url:homepage OR title:homepage) (fpga OR “field programmable gate array”) ((electrical OR principal OR lead) engineer)) ((maryland OR md OR virginia OR va OR d.c.) (301 OR 240 OR 703 OR 202 OR 540))

In 2003, Altavista was acquired by Yahoo! and assumed to be a dead engine. What happened was the portal was kept active, and instead of searching the AV indexed results you now search Yahoo! indexed results. Helpful if you like to search with strings like the one above.

If you decide to test the Altavista waters, note the field search commands below work on the site instead of the newer commands that work at Google, Live and Yahoo.

Altavista Command (Today's G/L/Y Commands in Parentheses):

url: (inurl:)
title: (intitle:)
host: (site:)
link: (linkdomain:)

Bottom line, I’m not going to give my Google up for this, I found some inconsistency in the results I was generating. But if you’re hunting high and low for a candidate and struggling building string in Yahoo, then maybe you should consider Altavista. Before you get too entrenched, check out this review from 2004 and learn in greater detail how to use the site and the drawbacks of it: http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/av/review.html