On it's round the world tour, AltaVista has arrived downunder -- announcing its new Web site localised for the Australian market.
Live today, the Web site -- AltaVista.com.au -- covers 7.5 million pages of Australian content available on the Web, according to AltaVista International General Manager Vesey Crichton. "We've indexed everything we could find."
"Australia is the ninth biggest group of users on AltaVista.com, that was the big incentive to launch the service here," Crichton said.
The Web site claims to cover 95 percent of Australian content available on the Internet. Australian Web users can search for content on AltaVista.com.au to get more refined information, according to Crichton. They can also search the global index and translate Web sites using a new feature called BabelFish.
However, for the already experienced AltaVista.com users, some of the familiar features have been canned to make way for the new, such as the Boolean feature.
"We worked out how to do search better, Australian users can do a richer search than using AltaVista.com," Crichton said.
According to Crichton, through indexing the content on the Web, AltaVista has been able to take out a lot of the useless Web sites such as 404 files, duplicatated sites, and spams.
"It's been a huge amount of effort to take away these from the search engine, but we don't want users to be wading through nonsense," Crichton said.
"We have one billion Web sites distilled to 600 million pages of useful information," he said.
AltaVista has been building local search engines for countries outside of the United States since 1999, setting up Web sites in nine countries so far, such as Germany, Sweden and the UK. AltaVista will invest US$25 million in to its global expansion.
According to Crichton, the next hotspots to launch a localised service are Hong Kong and Singapore, and eventually they will be providing a Web site for AltaVista New Zealand.
