I loved AltaVista. It didn't provide the cleverness of Google; you had to bring your own. I'd construct searches of the pattern: (word OR word) AND (word NEA

I loved AltaVista. It didn't provide the cleverness of Google; you had to bring your own. I'd construct searches of the pattern: (word OR word) AND (word NEAR word) and get excellent results. Of course, the Web was much smaller then.