Overture edges ahead of Google's search index

By Steve Malone

Posted on 21 Aug 2003 at 14:50

The soon-to-be-acquired Overture Services says it has the world's largest search index of approximately 3.2 billion documents. This compares with Google's current total of a tad over three billion pages.
The index comes from Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), which powers Alltheweb.com, which Overture bought back in April.

In addition to increasing the size of the index by over 1 billion documents, overture says the index features a new method of determining page relevance or page quality.

The expanded index is in addition to its other search engine acquisition AltaVista. Overture claims AV's multimedia index includes approximately 550 million files, with 125 million more audio/video files than Google.

Overture agreed to a Yahoo takeover in July.