Ultra-Fast Search Engine Performs 1,000 Searches Per Second

SANTA CLARA, CA (April 16, 1996) - Infoseek Corporation, which provides the popular Internet navigation service Infoseek Guide, today announced Ultraseek, a powerful new search technology intended to be faster, more comprehensive and more current than any other Internet search service available. Ultraseek has the capability to handle up to 1,000 queries per second, and is intended to have the largest and the first virtually realtime index of the Internet available. Ultraseek is scheduled to be generally available in June of this year.

New multi-threaded spider technology enables Ultraseek to offer virtually realtime indexing of web sites and their content for unmatched accuracy and faster response to more people. Its new search engine is faster than existing engines that are generally available and incorporates state-of-the-art technology developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Ultraseek also utilizes the Matisse object-oriented database from ADB.

"There are four things that users care about most in search technology: they want to know how fast it is, how big the database is, how current the information is, and how accurate the results are. Ultraseek is our answer to these key user needs," said Steve Kirsch, chairman and founder, Infoseek.

"With search technology capable of achieving unprecedented levels of size, speed and precision, we believe Ultraseek is the search service that can best deal with the growing volume of information to be found on the Internet," said Robin Johnson, president and CEO, Infoseek.

Up to 1,000 times Faster
Ultraseek is faster than any other search service generally available. With most search engines, the more query terms used the slower the process. This isn't the case with Ultraseek. Longer and more complex queries are run in split-second times. On more extensive queries, in fact, Ultraseek can be up to 1,000 times faster than other search engines generally available today. This affords fast and uniform response time on both complex and simple queries.

Always Current Content , Every Word Indexed
Content on the Internet is changing and expanding constantly. To deal with that and provide searches with complete, timely information, Ultraseek is slated to have the most up-to-date virtually realtime index of the Internet. Pages submitted to Ultraseek will be added to the index immediately and the most dynamic sites will be visited every day.

The new spider technology in Ultraseek indexes every word of every document of every site it checks. More than 25 million pages can be monitored for changes in the space of a week. The web scanner in the spider detects new and changed pages but loads only what's different from the prior check. The process handles "adds" and "deletes" in realtime so the index is updated immediately thereafter.

The "Smart" Search Engine
With Ultraseek, Infoseek adds intelligence to natural language queries, including the ability to automatically recognize proper names. It permits case sensitive queries, full and partial phrase queries, and name variants.

The new search service also includes Xerox Lexical Technology (XLT) developed at Xerox PARC. XLT is an advanced word root/indexing capability that provides the ability to relate all words with a specific root together. XLT raises the speed and exactness of search results through a proprietary linguistic capability licensed to Infoseek. It allows Ultraseek to recognize related words, thereby ensuring the most comprehensive and meaningful results for the user. This technology can also be applied to non-English lexicons such as German and Japanese. Ultraseek's search engine also has the capacity to stay on the leading edge of popular lexicon.

Ultraseek runs on a single Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 4000 server at up to 1000 transactions per second. Indexes can be run in parallel so that indexing speed is essentially unlimited.

About Infoseek
Infoseek Corporation, a privately-held company in Santa Clara, CA, provides a leading Internet navigation service. The service, Infoseek Guide, was recently named the number one site in advertising revenue by SIMBA Information Inc. Infoseek's search technology received PC Computing's 1995 Most Valuable Product award for the best Internet tool. Infoseek also received the 1996 PC World Pro/E award for Best Internet Search Engine. For more information, visit Infoseek's web site at http://www.infoseek.com/.

Infoseek, Infoseek Guide, Ultraseek and the Infoseek logo are trademarks of Infoseek Corporation, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, Ultra and Ultra Enterprise are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.