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Alta Vista (Search Tools)
The mainstream success of the Internet will ultimately depend on how good its search tools, directories and engines are and, it has to be said, they keep on getting better. Alta Vista is an excellent device from Digital for finding references or documents in Web pages and for trawling through thousands of newsgroups. Its super spider dispatches ilittle spider babies to crawl and collect data from all over the Web. Queries can either be simple or sophisticated (by date, results displayed in a pre-selected ranking order, using phrases and, or, not or near). There's also a random destination button under the name Surprise!