Excite@Home Corp. Tuesday unveiled a new version of its search technology that it claims will be able to catalog each of the Web's hundreds of millions of pages.

Set to debut in mid-August, Excite@Home said the technology will be at least twice as powerful as its current search engine which reaches less than half the Web's content.

While the number of pages on the Web is rapidly growing and is expected to top 1 billion by early next year, Excite@Home said its new service is scalable enough to handle the growth.

"Search engines have recently been accused of not being able to keep up. We are introducing a new search architecture capable of visiting and chronicling every single URL on the World Wide Web," said Kris Carpenter, Excite@Home's director of search products and services.

Tuesday's announcement was somewhat overshadowed by a Business Week online report that said Yahoo! Inc. may be looking to buy Excite@Home for as much as $17 billion.