Comment by marcus0x62

The thing I miss most from Altavista is the NEAR search keyword. If you remembered that a page contained two (or more) particular words in a sentence, but not the exact phrase, you could search for foo NEAR bar (or foo ~ bar), and it would return results where "foo" and "bar" occurred within 10 words of each other.

I think google had something like that for a while, but it never worked as well for me as Altavista's implementation.