When I thought of AltaVista, I though of a good search engine but it was not until couple weeks back during my project, where I test 3 search engines for best results, I found AltaVista performed lasst between the three search engines(Google And HotBot the other two). I thought AltaVista would do good but again, these search engines seem to be getting more excited about creating a portal rather than improving their main technology... search engine! I would recommend Google instead of AltaVista if your sole purpose is to get good search results but AltaVista might provide you with some other non-search related services such as email etc.