A user at your site initiates a search of the Web.

The query is transmitted to the AltaVista Search site where it's processed, and the results are sent back to your site as ASCII text in a Results format.

Advertising and other messaging can be incorporated into the page(s) of results from the AltaVista search. The attribution to Digital AltaVista would appear on each and every Results page; the form of attribution will be consistent with Digital's Guidelines for Commercial Use of AltaVista™ Logo and Word Marks.

Throughout this entire process, the visitor remains on your site.

What AltaVista Does
We enable AltaVista Business eXtensions, and generate your private access codes.

We provide the interface specifications.

We provide support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the connection to the AltaVista Search.

We will consider any technical suggestions from you to improve the performance of the AltaVista Search engine. (Digital will be glad to evaluate suggestions, but is under no obligation to accept or implement these suggestions.)

We will keep you informed in advance on enhancements to the AltaVista software technology.

What do you need to do?
Implement any engineering changes needed in your code to support AltaVista Business eXtensions

Display the Digital AltaVista-branded WWW search capability prominently at any place on your site where the Web search occurs.
(See " Digital's Guidelines for Commercial Use of AltaVista Logo and Word Marks.")

Implement your design for the user interface and the search inquiry.

Watch your visitors linger!

Query Format
The query format for AltaVista Business eXtensions is a simple query. We provide you with an encoded parameter to use in a cgi-bin script or in HTML from your own page to invoke the search.

Results Format
Results from a query are returned in an ASCII file format, which contains a list of Key and Value pairs. The Key starts at the first character of the line followed by an = (equal) sign, followed by the Value of the key.

Key information that is sent back includes:

• Total number of matches found.
• The number of keywords or phrases found.
• The number of documents that are returned on the page view, which is always between 0 and 10.
• The title of the document.
• The URL of the document.
• An abstract of the document.
• The size of the document in bytes.
• Date of the document.