August 18, 2003

As one might expect, it was only a matter of time that AltaVista would come out with its own version of a search toolbar.

The new AltaVista toolbar is an add-on to the Internet Explorer browser for Windows and gives you direct access to the AltaVista search engine from the browser-window. Those who have tried other toolbars know how easily you get into the habit of using the toolbar instead of going to the relevant search engine home page. Hence it makes sense for AltaVista to add one to their own arsenal of products and services. Toolbars make loyal visitors.

For the AltaVista team this is also good news. Their forthcoming owner, Yahoo!, has told the press that they consider keeping AltaVista as an experimental site after the take-over. Well, now the AltaVista team has demonstrated that is still capable of innovation, even if this innovation is not -- admittedly -- of the most radical kind. Is it any good? We haven't tested it thoroughly yet, but here are the features:

    Search for web pages, images, video and audio files
    Search for news in AlltheWeb's database
    Check weather, US area and ZIP codes
    Check time zones, exchange rates and much more

Plus, a person can even translate words and web pages with Babelfish, which covers 10 languages. The toolbar will remember your last search. The toolbar may also highlight the search query terms in the web page itself.

You may limit your search to one country or type of index. Like Google, AltaVista has included a pop-up blocker that stops pop-up ads from appearing. This is quickly becoming one of the most popular features of toolbars and new browsers, and may hopefully lead to the death of this annoying invention.

As toolbars go, this seems to be a good one. Given that Overture now owns both AltaVista and AlltheWeb, it would make sense to include an AlltheWeb alternative, so that you could use the same toolbar to search the AlltheWeb web index as well. AlltheWeb has also a FTP file search engine that will interest specialists. Given that AltaVista is to become part of the Yahoo! empire, it would also make sense to include links to the relevant category in the Yahoo! directory, or at least give users the chance to limit their search to this directory.

Sometimes it makes sense to search the much smaller directory databases, as the sites included have been quality checked by human beings. Moreover, you may use the directory database to find similar sites in the same category. Google's toolbar has become very popular among search engine optimizers and marketers because of its "PageRank-meter" that gives you the pagerank (i.e. a measure of the "popularity") of a page.

We doubt that webmasters would be equally interested in the AltaVista "pagerank", as AltaVista is not the traffic generator it used to be. Nevertheless, they may be interested in features that give you the current maximum bid for a search term in the Overture pay-per-click search engine, or direct access to the Overture keyword tool. The toolbar is compatible with Internet Explorer version 5.0 and above, running on Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, ME and XP. AltaVista’s toolbar is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.

Source: Pandia

        

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