Digital Equipment Corp has a piece of software called Alta Vista and described as a super spider for searching and indexing information on the World Wide Web. Finding a cyber needle in an ever-growing cyber haystack has long been a dream of Web users, Sam Fuller, vice-president of corporate research told Reuter: this technology is a major step in that direction. The Alta Vista software creates and dispatches a clutch of electronic spiders that crawl through the World Wide Web, searching for key-words. DEC says that it has taken the technology further than rival products by using its 64-bit Alpha and its networking technology to search more quickly and accurately. DEC says it has created an index of more than 8,000m words for 16.5m of the World Wide Web’s 30m pages of text on about 200,000 Web sites. It plans to offer public use of Alta Vista for free at its site, which ishttp://www.altavista.digital.com.
