Thank you for your comments.  As we are starting up the Beta phase of
the  Alta Vista project, we are trying to respond individually to
some of the  messages we have received.
 
We are putting the following hardware information on the site. 
 
Alta Vista is a very large project, requiring the cooperation of at
least 5  servers, configured for searching huge indices and handling
a huge Internet traffic load.  The initial hardware configuration
for Alta Vista is as follows:
 
Alta Vista  -- AlphaStation 250 4/266 
             4 GB disk 
            196 MB memory 
            Primary web server for gotcha.com 
            Queries directed to WebIndexer or NewsIndexer 
 
NewsServer  -- AlphaStation 400 4/233 
            24 GB of RAID disks 
            160 MB memory 
            News spool from which news index is generated 
            Serves articles (via http) to those without news server 
 
NewsIndexer -- AlphaStation 250 4/266 
            13 GB disk 
            196 MB memory 
            Builds news index using articles from NewsServer 
            Answers news index queries from Alta Vista 
 
Spider -- DEC 3000 Model  900 (replacement for Model 500) 
            30 GB of RAID disk 
            1GB memory 
            Collects pages from the web for WebIndexer 
 
WebIndexer --  Alpha Server 8400 5/300 
            210 GB RAID disk (expandable) 
            4 GB memory (expandable) 
            4 processors (expandable) 
            Builds the web index using pages sent by Spider. 
            Answers web index queries from Alta Vista 
 
Thank you, 
Alta Vista Technical Support