AltaVista has launched its News 2.0 news search, featuring added search functions. The changes are designed to help users better pinpoint articles they're looking for. Additionally, the company has expanded its index of multimedia files. That index now contains over 240 million unique media files, including images, video clips, MP3 and other audio files, according to the company.

"We have seen increasing interest in multimedia and news search capabilities, and have enhanced our multimedia index to meet this growing demand. Today's announcement represents another milestone in our plan to further integrate multimedia with our core results, and to provide the most robust multimedia and news resources on the Web," said Fred Bullock, Chief Marketing Officer of AltaVista Company.

In addition to conducting standard keyword amd phrase searches, users of AltaVista's News index can now limit their search to articles within a specific date range, or search specifically for articles that contain images. The news search continues to offer the following user-definable parameters:

• Date
• Topic
• Region
• Specific source

AltaVista's News index includes over four million articles from 3,000 sources, worldwide.

AltaVista's multimedia index now includes:

• Larger Images
• More .jpeg Files
• More International Image Files

Additionally, clicking on the "Advanced Search" option for an Image search reveals a new "Buttons/Banners" filter to exclude (or include) these often irrelevant "noise" images.

See also:

• AltaVista Builds Invisible Web Index
• AltaVista Now Uses "And" Instead of "Or"
• AltaVista Adds Current News & More Translations