AltaVista

Those of you that have access to your web logs may have seen a spider named 'scooter' accessing your pages. Scooter used to be altavista's robot. However, since the 1-FEB-01 site update, it looks like a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Scooter-tv35_Mc_kalyan_19, appears to have taken over where the old Scooter left off. Whichever spider altavista uses, it is one of the largest search engines on the net today, next to Google and Northern Light. It will usually take several months for altavista to index your entire site, although the past few months scooter hasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, altavista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good amount of time to index your site depending on how large your site is.

Altavista gets most of it's results from its own index, however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from Overture ( formally Goto ). ( see listings.altavista.com ). Altavista also gets results from the Looksmart network.