[June 14] Web portal Lycos
announced Wednesday that its collaboration with Norwegian search
technology developer Fast Search &
Transfer
has powered it to the top spot in Web coverage with over 340 million pages
indexed.
According to Lycos, the target remains one billion URLs in the coming year
— a figure the two companies fully expect to reach and a good
indication of the size of the visible Internet.
Ron Sege, executive vice president of Lycos, said the portal had
made a tremendous leap forward in catalog size and quality using
FAST technology, especially in FTP, MP3 and multimedia.
“By identifying the best search technologies and adding them to
our own proprietary approaches, we are able to create search
sites that help the user more easily exploit the power of the
Internet,” said Sege.
Rob Fisher, chief executive of Fast Search & Transfer,
confirmed his commitment to the billion-page target.
“We know of no other search architecture that can efficiently
scale to this magnitude and still provide response times of
less than a second,” said Fisher.
Fast Search & Transfer is expanding its strategic relationship
with Lycos by powering both Lycos main and advanced Web searches.
Among its technologies are flexible, high-capacity alert engines,
and advanced image and video compression.
Often suffering from a bad press for lagging behind such
portals as Yahoo! and Excite, Lycos had good news in June
when WebSideStory reported a significant increase in its
popularity. WebSideStory’s StatMarket application monitors
how much traffic each search engine sends to other
sites.
Lycos is currently in the process of being acquired by
Spain’s Terra Networks, S.A. in a massive stock-for-stock
transaction. However, the formation of Terra Lycos is still
subject to shareholder and regulatory approval.
