New Search Engine Goes For 100
Martin Burns
Member info
User since: 26 Apr 1999
Articles written: 143
New search engine,
FAST Search is aiming to index the entire web, and to be up to date at all times. FAST claims to already hold 200m URLs, around 25% of the estimated total of pages available, that it can search them in under a second and that it can rebuild its index in under 12 hours. Its aim is to build a search engine which covers pretty much the entire web, and is very nearly up to date at all times.
If this is true, it compares extremely well with existing search engines Northern Light, previously providing the best coverage at 16% of the Web, AltaVista (15.5%) and HotBot (11.3%), all of which also have significant issues with content expiry.Catch the full story at
the BBC.
Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.
Amongst his favourite things is Zope
He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.
Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?
Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?
