Overture Services, Inc., a commercial search service, today announced the launch of the world’s largest search index of approximately 3.2 billion documents. The index was developed by the former Web search unit of Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), which Overture acquired in April.
The expanded index delivers new levels of comprehensiveness, relevancy, and freshness for its index. 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.
The release of the expanded index follows Overture’s announcement earlier this summer that AltaVista (www.altavista.com) provides consumers with the largest multimedia index available on the Web today. The AltaVista multimedia index includes approximately 550 million files, with 125 million more audio/video files than the next highest competitor. Overture acquired the business of AltaVista in April.
Earlier in the year, made big news in February 2003 when it announced acquisitions of both one time big fish AltaVista and FAST Search/AlltheWeb. Overture believes that these acquisitions will help move it past paid placement advertising into both a paid search inclusion product and algorithmic search destination. Paid search inclusion, such as what Inktomi offers, is when a site pays a fee to be routinely visited and re-indexed, particularly a plus for sites with dynamic content.
Overture’s FastSearch Wins FreeServe from Google
Pay-per-click search firm Overture confirmed today that it has won a deal to provide algorithmic search results to Freeserve, displacing its number one rival Google.
Overture has been providing paid listings to Freeserve since 2000, but under the new agreement will also provide the algorithmic search results.
Freeserve said that it switched to Overture from Google on the back of evaluation of the relevancy and breadth of results sets offered by both indices.
Overture is determined to rival Google in both paid search advertising and organic search engine results since its acquisition of both FastSearch and AltaVista.
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