AltaVista Co. Thursday made a move it hopes will raise its profile in the crowded search engine market. The company unveiled a new site that features a number of technological advancements.

The CMGI Inc. (CMGI) majority-owned firm launched Raging Search, a search site designed for exerpeinced Internet users that provides faster results. Raging Search complements the AltaVista Search site that enables users to find an array of content.

Features of Raging Search include:

• Web index: An assessment of 1.2 billion URLs to derive a new search index comprising more than 350 million pages in addition to AltaVista's 30 million multimedia page index
• Relevancy -- A patented relevancy algorithm that delivers the most relevant results to users
• Directory -- the Web's largest, comprehensive directory comprising more than 2 million Web pages integrating content from Netscape's Open Directory Project and LookSmart

The launch comes at a time when AltaVista is poised to go public. The company first planned to go public last month, but decided to wait until the market correction subsided.

The search engine made a B2B play in March by licensing its technology to software maker Ariba Inc. (ARBA) to ease searches of e-commerce databases. In the same month, the company launched AV Photo & Media Finder -- a mulitmedia search tool designed to let users search among photos, video and audio clips on the Web.