I came to know about Altavista when at my customer location installed ’’Altavista Tunnel’’ and found this search engine really useful. A strong seach engine for boolean expressions, for any language and even most to the IT corporates using this engine for their site search
Advantages
It has a Comprehensive database. If you don’t get something at altavista, chances are there, that you might not get it anywhere else.
Disadvantages
The problem with Altavista is the relevancy of its results. Beyond the first dozen, I tend to get totally unrelated and weird results quite a lot of times. The screen is sometimes cluttered with too many ads
Another problem of altavista is the speed. It’s definitely not the fastest search engine around
Use Google.com whenever you need any technical searches, use Altavista for all other searches.