The struggling company is trying to recapture its former glory as a search engine heavyweight with a newly redesigned Web site, featuring a sleek, spare look that takes a cue from current search champ Google. The new site is scheduled to launch Tuesday.

Among other tweaks, AltaVista said, the new site will feature an ad-free home page; "fresher" search results, updated navigation for news publications and new tools for pinpointing relevant pages.

Read more: CNet News.

Cosmetics aside, they still give the crappiest search results of any search engine ever invented. No use to me. I'd rather use Yahoo and I have no use for Yahoo when there's Google.

I remember using Altavista for pretty much all my searches around 1996 BG (before google ). I agree with Tarkus, it really makes no point what are the load times or cosmetics, it's about the results and what you get out of the service, Altavista is one of the many search engines that sell keywords and merge them into results, completely unacceptable for my taste.

Same here, AltaVista was my daily search engine before Google came along with it's AND operators used by default.

BTW, Altavista's new layout is now up.

sasssy, but not as much as techspot's!!
and google still rocks... can't believe how simple the design is

I wonder how much AV paid the designers... hehe