Overture Announces An Even Bigger Index

Overture announced on August 21 ( http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030821/215091_1.html ) that they now have an index, developed by FAST, of over 3.2 billion Web documents. The press release says "In addition to increasing the size of the index by over 1 billion documents, the launch features several significant relevance enhancements that will improve the ranking of URLs. These features include a new method of determining how authoritative a page or site is on a specific topic as well as overall page quality."

Remember that Overture has been bought by Yahoo. So Yahoo now has its own searchable subject index, AltaVista's very extensive search syntax, and a huge Web document index--larger, they claim, than Google's. It appears they have all the marbles.

Here's the problem, however. They have to put all that together. Maybe they can leave out Yahoo's searchable subject index and emphasis on a variety of subscription properties, but it seems to me that they've got to fuse AltaVista and FAST. AltaVista's powerful search syntax combined with FAST's sizeable index and continued innovation sounds like a great combination, but can they get it together? And if they can get it together, how are they going to shake people loose from Google?

A hint to AltaVista/FAST: make RSS feeds available for your news search. Don't even worry about alerts by e-mail. News alerts by e-mail are great, but RSS feeds would be awesome.

Posted to Search Engines-Overture | TrackBack