Restrict Your Search to US Sites Only

As the World Wide Web becomes more worldwide, you're more apt to get foreign pages mixed in with your search results. If you find yourself overwhelmed by too many Russian, Japanese, and Brazilian Web pages in your listings, you can have AltaVista restrict its search to U.S. pages only. Just click the U.S. option under the search box on the AltaVista home page. Your search results will now eliminate non-U.S. pages from your search results.

Maybe you don't mind foreign pages, as long as you can read them. So you don't want to restrict your results to U.S. pages only, but you do want to filter out non-English pages? No problem. Just select the English option under the search box on AltaVista's home page and your search results will list English-language pages only.

One of the other projects that originated in the DEC research labs was the Babel Fish translation engine. Babel Fish can translate everything from words and phrases to complete Web pages—all automatically. It's a pretty cool tool, and useful, too.

insider The name Babel Fish comes from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the insight Galaxy, where a special breed of fish—the babel fish—is inserted into one's ear to translate all manner of intergalactic languages.

Babel Fish translation technology is included as part of the AltaVista search site in two different areas.

If you find a non-English page in your AltaVista search results, you can use Babel Fish to translate the entire page. Just click the Translate link next to the page's listing and you'll see an automatically translated version of the page in question.

You can also access and use Babel Fish manually to translate blocks of text. Just click the Translate link in the Tools section of the AltaVista home page, or go directly to babelfish.altavista.com. When the Babel Fish Translation page appears, enter the text in the Translate a Block of Text box, select the type of translation you want from the list, and then click the Translate button.

Continue reading here: Hot Bot at a Glance

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