Sizing Up Alltheweb.com's Fast Finds

Fast search engine claims to index 300 million pages.

Paul Heltzel, special to PC World

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Of an estimated 1.5 billion pages on the Web (according to the NEC Research Institute), the numbers leader appears to be the Norwegian company Fast Search & Transfer. The firm launched an update of its search engine this week, claiming an index of 300 million pages--about 50 million more than AltaVista, its nearest competitor.

What's more, Fast Search claims an average search time of less than half a second. The service also asserts that "porn and spam have been sharply reduced" from its catalog of pages in this most recent version.

Engines with greater numbers of pages don't necessarily produce more accurate results. In theory, however, they may benefit people who are looking for hard-to-find information that other engines might miss.

In casual testing, I found the Fast Search engine remarkably speedy, as advertised. In terms of providing relevant hits, it was in some cases equal to or better than other popular engines, including AltaVista and HotBot.

Fast Search doesn't appear to be playing up its potential as a portal search engine. The company licenses its engine and provides the back-end technology for Lycos's MP3 and FTP search engines.

Other engines are cranking along, too. A competitor, WholeWeb.net, is indexing each word from 1 billion Web pages, and plans to finish the job by June 31. If WholeWeb succeeds, it should have the most comprehensive catalog on the Web by this summer.

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