Another lightning piece of technology has slipped through Xerox Corp’s fingers as Infoseek Corp speeds up its Internet search engine to become ‘Ultraseek’ – at 1,000 searches per second. The company’s widely-used Internet navigation service – free to users and paid for by advertising – is one of a handful of powerful search engines on the Internet that include Digital Equipment Corp’s Alta Vista engine, America Online Inc’s Webcrawler and Yahoo! Corp. Using technology from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Ultraseek claims the capability to handle up to 1,000 queries per second, and is intended to build the largest, near real-time index on the Internet, using the Matisse object-oriented database from ADB Corp. It is intended to handle 25m Web pages, monitoring them in the space of a week and updating them as they change. Ultraseek is scheduled to be generally available in June. Ultraseek uses Xerox’s Lexical Technology developed at PARC. XLT is an advanced word root-indexing function that provides the ability to relate all words with a specific root together. Using this means longer query terms can be processed in a shorter time. In general, with search engine technology, the more query terms requested by the user, the slower the process. Infoseek intends Ultraseek to avoid this as longer and more complex queries can be run in split second times. On the more extensive queries, Ultraseek can be many times faster than other engines, the company claims. Ultraseek runs on a single Sun Microsystems Inc Ultra Enterprise 4000 server at up to 1,000 transactions per second. Indexes can be run in parallel so that indexing speed is essentially unlimited.
