Just a personnel nit: I actually found altavista to be better then any current search engine in terms of query power - what it was missing was the huge index..

Just a personnel nit: I actually found altavista to be better then any current search engine in terms of query power - what it was missing was the huge index.. Things like the 'near' keyword were awesome: john near doe matched 'john doe', 'doe, john', etc. It REALLY let you craft a query to return just the results you wanted. Unfortunately, that probably made it harder for the hordes of new users getting on-line. I'm soo tired of search engines just returning whatever they want, instead of what I asked for.