A New Search Engine Aspires to Index the Entire Web

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8/14/99 18:24 EST

Fast Search, at alltheweb.com plans to index the entire web by the end of 1999. Their timing couldn't be better. With the recent report that no search engine has more than 16% of the web indexed, search engine users are looking for more. Northern Light, which boasted the highest percentage of the web saw a huge climb in traffic once the report was released. Fast Search will benefit from their aspirations much in the same way.

It is estimated that today there are over 800 million web pages in existence. That number is expected to climb above the billion mark by the end of the year. With the web growing at such a fast rate, search engines are hard pressed to keep up. Todays popular search engines all have many limitations. Few engines have even near the storage capacity to index even half of the web. Currently sites will expire on a search engine after a given period of time, hence the need to resubmit sites on a regular basis.

Fast Search looks to end that practice. Since their inception in May, they have already indexed 200 million sites. With their PowerEdge® Dell Servers, running on Free BSD, they have the machinery. Their technology is also far faster than most other search engines, hence the name fast search.

We tested their technology with the common search term 'web development.' They produced over 3 and a half million hits within .3770 seconds. Quite impressive.

In order to register a URL with Fast Search, simply go to: http://www.fast.no/documents/atw/. They promise the URL will be indexed within 2 weeks.

This operation is destined to become extremely successful, and will probably become the backend of many other search engines, as Inktomi, AltaVista, and Google are. We expect that by the end of the year, Fast Search will become one of the top 10 engines.

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