AltaVista: Less Geek, More Chic

Ready for another portal marketing blitz? Say--another of those brash ad campaigns touting how a Web site can improve your life and change the world? With so many already, don't we have enough? AltaVista doesn't think so.

The faded online champ Monday launched its latest effort to regain its glory days with a massive site redesign. AltaVista will spend $120 million on an ad campaign to spread the word.

"Smart Is Beautiful" is the new battle cry, as AltaVista tries to catch up to portal heavyweights MSN, Yahoo, and others.

AltaVista, now owned by CMGI, has added live video and around-the-clock news, with a revamped shopping section with price comparisons and gift suggestions. The search engine is beefed up to scour more than 90 percent of the Net, and it includes listings from America Online's Open Directory Project.

I tested Monday's upgrades to the site and I'm already feeling a wee bit smarter.

Live From the Net: It's AltaVista

Central to Monday's relaunch is AltaVista Live, which acts as the portal's live wire to the world. Along with up-to-the-nanosecond news feeds from the Associated Press, Reuters, and 100 other partners, AltaVista Live weaves together "socialize" functions like voice and text chat, a personal calendar, message boards, and affinity clubs.

These are great attempts at rounding up bread-and-butter portal tools either buried or missing from earlier versions of AltaVista. Although a great improvement, they are no great portal breakthrough and indicate a first attempt at better organization for the portal.

The multimedia focus is one of the coolest features. On AltaVista Live, you can surf a wide selection of video clips from a variety of sources, available through a partnership with FastTV.

For example, on Monday, breaking news of Pat Buchanan's jump to the Reform party was accompanied by CNN video coverage. AltaVista also offers live Web cams of traffic status and tickertape financial information.

Still not functional on Monday is a new "My Live" page function, which you can personalize with any of 1000 Web cams plus a custom stock ticker. Still missing (and needed) are live Net radio music feeds, which are a staple at competing portals.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

AltaVista search is much improved. As promised, search results are more relevant are easier to understand. It's also easier to find specific types of content, and more of it.

Using AltaVista Focus Search, you can separately sift 250 million Web pages, 25 million multimedia objects, news sources, discussion groups, and electronic merchant inventories.

AltaVista's search functions also incorporate the Netscape Open Directory, a Web site listing compiled by volunteer editors. Its concept is to use human-generated site descriptions instead of relying on keyword match-searching. It makes a difference; you can find a great Julia Child recipe instead of retrieving Web sites that contain the phrase "recipe for disaster."

AltaVista search also incorporates a technology that crawls the Web. But instead of counting how often a keyword appears on a site, it assesses how highly regarded the Web site is, based on the number of other Web pages with hyperlinks to that page.