There have been changes at Altavista News over the last 2 or 3 weeks. Greg Notess noticed that Alltheweb News and Altavista News were using the same database. Alltheweb's results were identical to Altavista's for the last 7 days. I tested Altavista News and discovered that boolean operators were no longer supported, photos were gone, and fielded search didn't work as well as before. Now Altavista News and Alltheweb News have the same format for searching the news source - either site or url - for example, site:globeandmail.com "paul martin", or url:globeandmail "paul martin".
Now for the shocking news - Altavista News has cut its archive back to 30 days, thus removing the chief reason to use it. Altavista had been the only news search engine to have entries from the last year. Alltheweb still seems to be limited to 7 days.
Posted by Gwen at January 12, 2004 02:21 PM