WWW5: digital's alta vista product line

overview:

digital equipment corporation presented its alta vista product line on a world wide TV broadcast. after the presentation, people from different places, including paris, were able to ask questions to digital's president bob palmer and to the manager of digital's Internet products.

alta vista is currently the most popular and fastest search engine on the World Wide Web. the Web Indexer runs on three AlphaServer 8400 under DEC UNIX, each system is equipped with 6 GB of memory (RAM) and 10 Alpha processors clocked at 300 MHz. the data is kept on 210 GB of disks. alta vista indexes approximately 3'000'000 pages per day and has about 12'000'000 visitors per day.

announcement of the alta vista product line:

digital announced that they will make the alta vista software available to their customers. this will allow companies and organizations to use the power of the alta vista search engine within their own Web space, regardless if it is connected to the Internet or not.

alta vista comes in three editions:

• personal edition: allows to index and query the entire data on a personal computer. this helps to find information, regardless if it is stored in a mail, a Word document, an Excel sheet, a plain text file etc.
• workgroup edition: allows to index and query the workspace of an entire workgroup.
• enterprise edition: allows to index and query the information space of a whole company or organization.

you will find more information about the alta vista search tool here .

questions from the audience:

there were some questions about the stunning performance of the alta vista search engine. digital also said that they have no intention to charge for this service in the future (which does not mean that the alta vista software is for free !)
during the whole conference, digital got a lot of applause for its alta vista search engine and it is obvious that people really like that service.

conclusion:

alta vista is a perfect tool to help people to find information in the Web space. this is true on a local and on a global scale. at the ETHZ, there is a need for such a service as well. therefore, we are currently in the process of setting up a test installation of alta vista enterprise edition at the ETHZ. other search engines are also under consideration. please check the WebMaster's news corner for the latest news.

back to WWW5 main document.