Slashdot Mirror
New Search Engines
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "It seems that there's a new company out there
called Fast Search
and Transfer which is competing with Inktomi.
They have a demo online at www.alltheweb.com and their engine seems to be ultra-fast.
News about this is available here.
Try out the demo, it is awesome what these guys have done."
It is fast, but so far I've not had as good luck searching as
with other engines. And the speed is probably largely due to
the sparse HTML. But its not bad.
isn't this just ftpsearch with a new name?
I wonder how fast Inktomi would be if it had a light load like this one, or how slow this would be with a load like on yahoo...?
Seems broken for Lynx 2.5, which is all that either of my ISPs provides. fsck 'em.
Also interesting that the first link on /. is an annoying fast redirect, making the back button useless for just clicking back.
Vile, vile, htmler.
Works fine with Lynx 2.6.. and even that is ANCIENT. I assume you still browse the web with Mosaic when you want pictures? ;-)
You can press Alt-LeftArrow for Back. Pressing on a keyboard is always faster than clicking the mouse.
I did a search there on "exclamation points" and your post came up!!!!!! :)
I was searching for 'thin client', since I'm in ...
that business
0.0050 seconds search time
488527 documents found
That rocks.
legend has it that grad students make lsd in the labs...
Its speed obviously has nothing to do with sparse HTML. Where did CmdTaco learn how to benchmark search-engines anyway?
Seems that the search-engine industry just got a lot tougher. This'll kill Inktomi.
I read an article about memory database in the sense that the whole database is in database and Yahoo showed interest. Exsiting databases like Oracle all store the data on harddrive because in old days memory was too expensive. I'm not saying alltheweb.com *is* using a memory database but it reminds me of the article I read.
Last msg had a typo. The correct one is:
***********************
I read an article about memory database in the sense that the whole database is in memory and Yahoo showed interest. Existing databases like Oracle all store the data on harddrive because in old days memory was too expensive. I'm not saying alltheweb.com *is* using a memory database but it reminds me of the article I read.
Following recent development , the the days of general computers will truely come to an end real soon. I believe this is just the first example where software and hardware combines into one generic computing device.
better yet, click on the back arrow and HOLD it. a menu will appear. select /. and you're away!
these people have been around awhile. The "fast ftp search" (http://www.mgu.bg/pages/ftpsearch.html) has been around as long as i can remember, and of course the much-discussed mp3 search engine at http://mp3.lycos.com/ was using the same engine.
interesting to see this though.
anyway.. http://www.google.com/ and http://search.oth.net/ kick ass.
On my first search, I got the same item for #6 and #7.
No, that is not normal. It looks like they still have a few bugs to work out.
Immediately, the usefulness of the first results page was knocked down by 10%.
I searched, on a whim, for debian cd images (try it!) and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th hits were all the same! Doesn't instill the greatest confidence in their searching algorithms, does it? No thank you, I'll go back to www.google.com, hit "I'm feeling lucky", and get sent directly to what I was looking for...
If you browse through all the links on your
subject once you will definitely want to
be able to get the new ones since last week,
that would probably help more than any computer
trying to think for you (oops, cursed in church)
A nice boolean formula could do that thinking,
but this search engine don't seem to do much
wildcard matching.
fast aren't new, remember ftpsearch.ntnu.no?
the one that lycos nabbed a few months back?
fast are behind that one
they're very good
As soon as they get much closer to their "all the web" idea, I'll take another look. But for now my default engines will stay.
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I clicked the button and I had results before the mouse had fully un-clicked.
That's damn fast!
There's gotta be a reason apart from a fast machine. I have this feeling that the database ain't so big, making the searches incredibly speedy.
Still, it's a great speedy thing to see.
Try searching for "shareware" and check out the
results -- seems they don't discourage keyword
spammers!
As someone else commented, these people wrote the search engine behind ftpsearch.lycos.com. Which is fast. There are a few more reasons, apart from sparse HTML.
This engine asks for no cookies
The output is not in a table, so you see the results as they arrive in your browser, without having to wait for the whole table (in lynx it makes no difference
The load is not very high yet, probably.
But having seen FTPsearch in action for the last 4-5 years, and having seen it always return results quickly, it wouldn't surprise me if alltheweb stayed fast.
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
This technology isn't very new.
Parts of it at least were developed at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, and used in the search engines FTPSEARCH and MP3Search.
But it's really nice to see them get the publicity they deserve.
Harald
The only search engine I know that does a good job at this is Google. It is so good at finding relevant sites, I don't care if the response time is occasionally a little slow.
(Google uses a nice algorithm where they gauge the "importance" of a page by how many other sites link to it.)
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Damn this engine is fast! And I love how the searching syntax is spelled out on the first page. This is really phenomenal. Certainly my new default search engine.
that alltheweb.com is *fast*. good coverage too.
--
Wage Slave Journal
Egosurfing, I found it quite refreshing to NOT see my old web pages that died 4 months ago, yet found a large number of hits to people I'm apparantly related to. (gasp) Still no sign of my current web page tho. Curious. More time perhaps.
But did anyone else find there's number of identical links? (I'm used to metacrawler, so maybe this is normal for search engines?)
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
I wonder if these means that Dell is going to start supporting FreeBSD on their machines as well.
-Jae
Interesting to notice, their HTTP headers proclaim the site is running FreeBSD. It is nice to see FreeBSD and Linux being used in large commercial applications.
I find this really hard to believe but CNET is doing spamdexing.
The specs on the search engine are available at http://web.fast.no/product/search/d et.asp?id=34.
The press release doesn't exactly scream it out, but the search engine is actually just a little bit of software stuck on top of some pretty neat custom hardware. They call their chip the FAST PMC (Pattern Matching Chip), and their server is just your average (well, sort of average) high end server, with a buttload of those chips stuck on PCI cards.
The specs on the PMCs are available at http://web.fast.no/product/PMC/det.asp ?id=52.
FAST claims 100 MB/sec throughput on each chip, and each card has its own RAM (from 8 MB to 2 GB). The chips actually run at 100 mHz each, and even have support for RegEx matching (slightly limited).
From the specs:
A typical configuration will contain 4 to 8 plug-in cards per search node, and 16 or 32 chips on each card.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed - putting search capabilities into hardware is a pretty good idea, especially since so much of a modern processor is geared toward things like Floating Point calculations, which doesn't help text searching at all.
Scott Severtson
Software Developer
Auragen Communications
scotty@auragen.com
Scott Severtson
Senior Architect, Digital Measures
"...have constructed an advanced search capability using a high-performance, low-cost software/hardware combination...."
:)
That little quote made me wonder what they were running. Why didn't they just say? They didn't seem at all shy about mentioning the Dell 4300s.
If the web servers are running FreeBSD, I wonder if it's also powering the database servers.
Maybe I'm reading too much into their vagueness here. It seems to me that companies which have close ties to MS (like Dell) are a little reluctant to trumpet the virtues of other operating systems too loudly. As a result, I tend to think:
#ifdef PRESS_RELEASE
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I found unique info to plagarize for the paper I'm writing.
FAST is a norvegian company that specialize in fast algorithms for search and also transfer of video and images. Since FAST is a research company they are interested in selling their technology, not productifying it themselves. All the web is a marketing site for FAST technology and is probably going to be closed down after an eventual sale (according to norvegian newspapers).
The company has a couple of strange fellows working for them, there is former archeologist, medical doctors and statisticans. Guess a combination of their speciality fields spurred a really strange, but fast, algorithm.
Hope that will answer som questions.
By the way, the URL to fast is www.fast.no.
I just did a search for my real name and came up with a ton of accurate links, more than any other engine in the past. Hot damn, ain't that fancy? =)
What can I say? I've bookmarked this engine.
It is still the dark of night.
Nice, fast powerful, whatever... yet another Altavista with maybe one day more relevant results.
Still, for us, common mortal beings and small company sites (50'000 to half a million pages), maybe a decent accessible search engine like Alkaline is more than enough! It's free!
cheers
dB.
dB@dblock.org