AltaVista refreshes its offering

Is the one-time search giant ready to slap Google down to size?

AltaVista has launched a technology that should improve searches on its site by categorising results into subgroups. Called AltaVista Prisma, the service will produce up to 12 subgroups of results for any given search term, in addition to the usual list of websites and documents containing the word. For example, searches for film titles or books would bring up a subgroup containing links to sites relating to the starring actors, authors or publishers.