It was not a success. The AltaVista Search Personal eXtension, as it is called yes, with the odd capitalization crashed every time its indexer ran on my computer, especially when I told it to make a searchable index of all my mail. But the latest version, called AltaVista Personal, is a charm. It indexed 13 million words on my PC in 23 minutes the first time it ran, and has since taken only a few minutes each day to update my current index of 18 million words. Indexing will take longer on slower PCs, but don't expect a big slowdown.
Processor speed is a small factor.
Disk access is what takes the most time. I use the Windows 98 scheduler to lighten the load on my PC's processor. You can just tell AltaVista's indexer to run all the time, waiting for the preset moment to run its index, but having it run through a scheduler makes more sense. The best thing about AltaVista Personal is the fact that it works just like the regular AltaVista Web site. Everything is the same, except, of course, the location of the files it is searching through.