MUMBAI: Here is an alliance that promises to bowl out the competition with a googly. AltaVista, a leading global provider of search services has signed an agreement with CricInfo.com which claims to be the home of cricket on the Internet.
 

AltaVista will power search functionality on CricInfo.com and include CricInfo content on AltaVista sites worldwide. CricInfo will provide AltaVista cricket fans with audio content as well as fast links to the latest news stories and CricInfo's popular scores service. This alliance will provide search users with the most comprehensive sources of cricket information available on the Web.

Fan clubs and teams with sites of their own can now field a search box that searches either the entire AV database or just the cricinfo.com site. Cricket hungry web masters are encouraged to download the co-branded CricInfo and AltaVista search boxes from http://www.altavista.com/r?cricinfo so their visitors can find out how their favourite teams and players are doing.

Director Cricinfo Dr. Badri Seshadri said, "We normally serve over 15 million people with 200 million page views each month. Due to the considerable increase in traffic we anticipate for the World Cup, we knew we had to switch from our in-house search capability to a world-class search engine. AltaVista stood out from the competition because of their great technology combined with a shared focus on global markets."