AltaVista is recognised as one of the favorite Internet search engines. It has a simple user interface, and can quickly and easily find almost any information on the Internet. Digital, the company that created AltaVista has produced AltaVista Personal 97 to make this kind of search possible on PC hard drives. This program will find information on your computer drives as easily as the Web based AltaVista can do a surname search for you. One of the best features of AltaVista Personal 97 is it's cost - free.

AltaVista Personal 97 was first released early last summer (US) as a retail product with a US price of $29.95. It is now being offered as a free download from the AltaVista Web site. The download version is identical to the boxed version, no trial period, no expiration date and none of the features have been crippled. AltaVista Personal 97 is for Windows 95 and NT only - there is no Macintosh version and apparently there are no plans to offer a Windows 3.1 version.

AltaVista is a true Windows program and runs on both Netscape and Internet Explorer whilst maintaining the same interface as the Web version of AltaVista search. This package can also be used for Internet searches as well as being able to search Usenet archives.

After downloading and installing AltaVista Personal 97 you must index your Hard Drive, this can take between half an hour and an hour, depending on the size of your drive(s). Once that is done, you have the desktop ability to find almost anything on your drives.

AltaVista Personal 97 is capable of reading and indexing 200+ different file formats, including word processing documents, spreadsheets, HTML pages, PowerPoint documents and ASCII text files. It will even read and index your Netscape cache. The latter is a particularly convenient tool for Web surfers who'd like to find their way back to a site previously visited, as long as the browser cache has not been flushed.

AltaVista Personal 97 will not directly read data from the most common genealogy programs such as Family Tree Maker and Ultimate Family Tree etc. However, if you have turned your database into HTML files then AltaVista Personal 97 is capable of reading and indexing the HTML files, as well as being able to do the same for Word, WP, email and text files.

The capability of indexing every word in your files is one of AltaVista Personal's most compelling features. Remember that Email reference you got about ggGrandfather from your 3rd cousin twice removed, now where exactly did you put that now that you need it? AVP97 will find it for you, in a flash.

Some configuration work is necessary for AVP97 to find and index your Email messages but, with the assistance of the built in help files you can add additional file types to the packages capabilities, including most common Email formats, therefore allowing it to index these as well.

AltaVista Personal 97 has most of the common search capabilities, including the use of wildcards and some Boolean search parameters such as AND, OR, NOT or NEAR.

AltaVista is not a replacement for the search capabilities of your genealogy program, but should be considered as a complementary tool to help roundup those "other" files and references that tend to end up in different areas of your drive.

AltaVista Personal 97 can be used for indexing local and multiple drives as well as network drives. Also, when you are on AltaVista's Web site, it recognizes that you have AltaVista Personal 97 installed locally and includes your harddisk search options in the pull-down menu.

There are some drawbacks to this program though, starting with it's download size, a large 7+ megabytes. Installation takes up 8Mb of your drive space and the program requires considerable system resources. You should be running at least 12Mb of RAM on a Windows 95 system. If you have less than that, or having a number of other programs open when running AVP97, system performance will be affected noticeably. Index files also require about 8Mb of drive space for every Gigabyte of data files indexed.

AltaVista Personal 97 does not index files as they are created, so to keep your search results accurate you will have to set the in-built indexing option to do this on a regular basis. The options you will find for automatic re-indexing are hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or you could do your indexing updates manually.

Although heavy on system resources, I have found AltaVista Personal to be a tremendous help in rounding up stray files and genealogical references on my drives (I have two on my PC and another two network drives that got the treatment).