http://www.altavista.com  could be said to be "The One". It 's the No. 1 reference search moteur. I use it often to search for words and look at the first page of about 10 references. Hence one can build up a picture about a subject area in order to be informed and acquire links to go surfin' and cruisin'. It also has a nifty reduced address version, namely http://www.av.com ,. So can a classy thing like this have faults. I would tend to think not. The results may not always be very exciting and the email service may have had a gap in its on-line status. But I'm not complaining !
A sub-partlet I have printed out is the Research Guide > Quiz. On the Italian version of the site at  http://it.altavista.com    at the time of writing this page (December 2001), the 'Guida alla Ricerca' and Test is at  http://www.altavista.wwmind.com/education2/guida ,.