AltaVista has unveiled a new service designed to help people refine their searches by offering several subgroups of results along with a single long list of all websites containing the search term.
The company, which has steadily lost traffic to search engine rivals such as Google, said the new service was found in beta tests to increase the amount of time people spent on its site, and the number of searches they conducted.
Called AltaVista Prisma, the new service produces up to 12 sub-groups of results when a given term is entered in the search engine, the company said.
The term "eagles," for example, calls up subgroups including "legal eagles," "nest," "Philadelphiaeagles, and "lyrics" - automatically refining the user's search.
A spokeswoman for AltaVista said the service, which was designed to address the ever-expanding volume of Web content, is also offering additional research benefits.
Searches of movie titles, for instance, will typically bring up links to starring actors; searches of books may yield links to authors or publishers.
AltaVista, a division of CMGI, said the new search system works by scanning through Web documents to identify words and phrases that are most closely related to a given search term.