The latest salvo in the portal war came from behind Digital Equipment Corp’s lines today, with AltaVista announcing it now has 140 million web pages indexed. If that claim is true, it restores AltaVista to its former glory as the web’s largest index, a position it reportedly conceded to HotBot and Excite last year. The size argument is one of the oldest in the brief history of web search engines. When AltaVista first appeared in December 1995 with more than 20 million pages indexed, it dwarfed rivals Lycos and Excite overnight. They swiftly ramped up and for most of 1996, AltaVista, Lycos and InfoSeek were steady on 30 million pages, with HotBot and Excite well ahead at 50 million. In March 1997, controversy erupted on ZDNet, when John Pike, webmaster for the Federation of American Scientists site at www.fas.org, found AltaVista had indexed only around 10 per cent of his 6000 pages. Critics immediately accused AltaVista of falsely claiming to index the entire web. Digital protested that its indexing practices were sound, and that sometimes a smaller index was faster and therefore more efficient. Still, in September 1997 the company announced a steep increase in indexed pages, to 100 million. HotBot and Northern Light followed suit. A study by Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com) in March, 1998, found that HotBot had the largest index with 110 million pages. AltaVista came second on 100 million, while Northern Light and Excite trailed on 67 and 55 million respectively. However it’s worth noting that these figures are based on published claims by the vendors themselves. A recent article in Science magazine measured the sizes of search engine indices and found in one case – that of Lycos – a 200% discrepancy. Lycos claimed 30 million pages but Science says it only had 10 million. With the stakes in the portal market so high these days, AltaVista’s claims could probably do with a similar dose of salt.
