Ni2 (Net indexer 2)

Ni2 (Net indexer 2) is the indexer for the AltaVista public search engine. According to AltaVista's parent company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Ni2 can index "an astounding one gigabyte of text per hour." Ni2 generates a link for each word that AltaVista's Web crawler, Scooter , brings back. It eliminates duplicates and ranks entries so that queries will produce more effective results.

In addition to AltaVista's free public search service, DEC sells AltaVista for individual use (downloaded to your computer, it can search everything on your hard disk) and for enterprise intranet . Ni2, Scooter, and the AltaVista product offerings are described at DEC's AltaVista Web site .