Electric Monk and Alta Vista

Farrell McGovern wrote in to tell us about Electric Monk. Basically, it is/was a nice search engine that took natural language as input, and searched AltaVista. Well, recently it seems that AltaVista started rejecting their referrals. I'm at odds with this- anyone ever look at AltaVista.Com? It It's not The Real AltaVista, but rather a front end that someone else was selling ad space on. Ages ago it used to be barely noticable that it wasn't the real thing, and I found that bordering on offensive, but Electric Monk really one upped the original interface. What do you guys think?