Digital's Samuel H. Fuller, VP of corporate research for Digital, and Alan Jennings, Digital's manager of advanced technology business development, also told Newsbytes that Alta Vista has "re-started its Web crawling," to add even more pages to the total of 60 million Web pages -- representing half of all pages on the Web -- that were already indexed by December 15, when the new "super spider" Web facility opened to the public. "And as Alta Vista took off as the fastest growing Web site, we have quadrupled the capacity of our AlphaServer 8400 system from two to eight processors, and doubled the memory," noted Fuller. This leaves a "factor of two headroom" in terms of both processing power and memory, meaning that a single 8400 system should be able to host and accommodate an index for the entire Web, the VP added. The Alta Vista site also uses a smaller Alpha server to house the "super spider" itself. As reported in Newsbytes on December 15, Jennings previously said that Alta Vista is able to search up to 2.5 million Web pages a day. Lycos, Alta Vista's closest competitor, had searched only 7 million Web pages up to that time, and the World Wide Web Worm about 3 million Web pages, in comparison to Alta Vista's 60 million pages, Newsbytes was told. Alta Vista's high search speeds are made possible by the ability of the super spider to algorithmically "breed" batches of smaller Web crawlers, together with the use of Alpha processing power and high-speed ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks, according to Jennings. Fuller and Jennings told Newsbytes this week that Digital is currently assessing Alta Vista usage patterns and the half dozen- or-so "business inquiries" received each day to decide where to take Alta Vista on a commercial basis. On Friday, December 15, Alta Vista received 300,000 hits, a number that grew to 600,000 on Monday, December 18, 1.5 million by Wednesday, December 20, and 2 million per day following the December holidays, according to Fuller. In earlier beta testing, some 10,000 users employed Alta Vista to look up references to themselves and their families, to locate old friends and college roommates, and to access market research, information about the Web, and facts about corporate travel destinations. Like their counterparts within Digital, many Web users among the public at large have been employing Alta Vista for genealogically search purposes, Jennings said. Alta Vista is also emerging as "a real solid research tool covering the breadth of the Web," he asserted. In addition to obtaining an index of all Web sites containing a specified search term, and being able to move to those sites through hotlinks, users can obtain "reasonably good information regarding the characteristics of Web sites," such as "how frequently (the sites) are referenced, and the number of pointers." You can also employ can also employ case-sensitive matches, and limit searches to titles or other specified sections of a document. Digital officials have been impressed by Web users' "ingenuity" in inventing applications for Alta Vista. One company, for example, wanted to get in touch with all other firms with links to its site, he illustrated. Upon learning that Alta Vista is able to search for URLs (user resource locators), or pointers, the user conducted a URL search, and then proceeded to send out a broadcast e-mail message over the Internet to all linked sites. Business inquiries, he reported, have fallen into three main categories: users who want to use Alta Vista internally, license the search engine, or advertise their goods and services on the Alta Vista home page. "We'll start to make decisions on these within the next 30 days, and by the end of the quarter, (the decisions) will be part of our general business plans," Jennings told Newsbytes. "Digital is inching toward decisions on what they're going to do," pointed out Jim Green, an analyst at Summit Strategies. "Clearly, this Web site has met with astounding success. Alta Vista lets you start to make sense of the Internet. It makes you think about exactly what you want, because it will give you everything," the analyst told Newsbytes. "I see Alta Vista as a very useful tool for competitive analysis," observed Greg Kline, director, Network Integration and Management Research, at the Business Research Group (BRG). "I think that as Digital gets closer to finalizing their plans, they'll be speaking more about Alta Vista's most sophisticated search capabilities. And as Web servers become the corporate infrastructure through the "IntraNet,' users will be seeing the need for a tool to index their information assets," Kline told Newsbytes. You can access the Alta Vista home page on the Web at http://www.digital.com . A.E.N.