UK ISP Improves Searches

Users of Freeserve, the U.K.'s most popular portal and ISP will be able to search more effectively thanks to new technology from Fast Search & Transfer.

by Colin C. Haley of boston.internet.com [October 22, 2002]

Users of Freeserve, the U.K.'s most popular portal and Internet service provider will be able to search more effectively thanks to a new deal with Fast Search & Transfer.

The new service will retrieve 20 times more online content with a freshness rate four times better than before the upgrade. Previously, Freeserve used Inktomi for searches.

"Our users are now able to retrieve the freshest information available from multiple sources including Freeserve's e-commerce, partner, member, directory, content, and services pages across a variety of platforms," said Jon Gisby, Freeserve's managing director of portals.

FAST, which is based in Oslo, Norway, boasts advanced linguistic technologies, support for over 225 file formats and 49 languages, and categorization and dynamic result clustering.

The Freeserve deal comes three weeks after FAST made several improvements to its AlltheWeb.com search engine. More upgrades are planned for mid-November, the company said

The recent upgrades, designed to help it go head-to-head with rival Google, include:

• regional filtering to restrict results to documents from particular regions
• document depth filtering to search homepages only or to go deeper into site pages
• embedded content search for images, audio, video, or flash
• personal homepages search, for fan sites and other non-corporate destinations

FAST is also improving the "visual relevancy" of AlltheWeb's results. Now, users can preview the context in which their search term appears within the page. The technology, available to FAST portal customers such as Lycos, highlights search terms in results pages.

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