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AltaVista Business Solutions AltaVista Co. 1825 South Grant Street, Suite 200 San Mateo, CA 94402 tel: 877-398-4287 Web: http://solutions.altavista.com
Pricing and Options
Free for indexing up to 3,000 pages, $4,995 for up to 10,000 pages, $8,995 for up to 20,000 pages, $19,995 for up to 50,000 pages. 45-day trial version without page limits may be downloaded for evaluation.
Hardware and Software Requirements
128 MB RAM minimum, with hard disk swap space equal to at least three times installed RAM, on one of the supported platforms:
Windows NT with Service Pack 3 or higher on Pentium (200 MHz or faster) or Alpha
Tru64 Unix 4.OB/4.OE on Alpha processors (21064/200 processor or greater) Solaris 2.5.1/2.6/2.7 on SPARC processors
Recommended capacities for varying sizes of index: 10,000 or fewer pages: 4 GB disk space, minimum 128 MB RAM for mostly HTML and text files, minimum 256 MB RAM otherwise.
100,000 pages: 6 GB disk space, 256-512 MB RAM for mostly HTML and text files, minimum 512 MB otherwise.
Another rule of thumb: indexes generally produce files that are 33 percent to 50 percent of the size of the documents indexed, for example, the index for 1 GB of documents could be expected to be between 330 MB and 500 MB.
Overview
AltaVista Search was developed within Digital Equipment Corp. It was designed to provide quick and precise retrieval of text from vast e-mail archives. With the growth of the World Wide Web, DEC applied it to creation of a powerful Internet search capability that spotlighted the capabilities of DEC hardware.
Soon after Compaq acquired DEC, both the Alta Vista Internet search site and the search software that powered it were sold to CMGI, which created the wholly owned AltaVista Co. to continue these efforts. "AltaVista Business Solutions" is often specified as the party responsible for the search software, though there is no indication that it constitutes a separate division of the AltaVista Co.
Installation and Setup
Installation of Alta Vista Search is a bit less automatic than with many of the other products in this report. In attempting to address installation on a wide variety of platforms, the description of the specifics on at least the NT platform was given short shrift. In particular, the fact that you...