Infoseek tuneup gives engine top speed
Infoseek is promising to beat the speed records of all competitors with its new Ultraseek search engine, which it says can deliver up to 1,000 queries per second.
Ultraseek is scheduled to debut in June and will replace the current engine used on the Infoseek site. Ultraseek will monitor 25 million pages a week for changes, indexing every word on every page.
Infoseek also today partnered with Xerox's Xsoft unit to incorporate Xerox Lexical Technology (XLT) into Ultraseek. Under XLT's word-root indexing, for example, a search for swim would also provide documents containing swam and swum.
Separately, America Online's Net access service GNN today relaunched its WebCrawler search engine. The new version lets users search by phrases rather than just keywords and summarizes results in order of relevance, including links to sites on related topics.
The new version also allows users to surf the Web backwards with a feature that shows all the sites that point to a given site on the results list; for example, if the user searched for news and selected CNET, they would also see all the other sites that link to www.cnet.com.
The new WebCrawler also provides developers with Spidey Search Buttons, which they can add to their own Web pages. The buttons can be programmed to search for specific topics. A Web page about restaurant reviews, for instance, could include a search button to look for new restaurants.
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