The Web Other Search Resources

Find all links to your site, excluding pages from your own site

link:http://my.site.com/ AND NOT url:http://my.site.com/ in the Advanced query.
+link:http://my.site.com/ -url:http://my.site.com/ in the Simple query.
To speed up the search, you can leave out the very common words http and com.

Find someone

The person you want to find could be listed as Jane Smith, "Jane L. Smith," or "Smith, Jane L."
Try the proximity operator in the Advanced Query: Jane NEAR Smith.

Use AltaVista as a spelling or usage checker

Is it CDROM or CD-ROM?
Make a search for both words, and compare the word count: CD-ROM wins.

Use AltaVista as a news reader

Well, it is a news reader, since we serve the articles. Use the newsgroups: keyword. In the Advanced Query you can select a range of dates. And of course you can use the search capabilities to exclude certain authors or newsgroups, or to favor certain topics.

Bookmark a page with certain options enabled

• Start from our home page
• select the options you are interested in, such as news, return format, text-only version
• make an empty query with nothing in the text input window, but hit SUBMIT nevertheless
• save the returned page in a bookmark

You can restore your favorite options by simply retrieving this URL from your bookmarks.