Abstract. The general number field sieve (GNFS) is the most efficient algorithm known for factoring large integers. It consists of several stages, the first one being polynomial selection. The quality of the selected polynomials can be modelled in terms of size and root properties. We propose a new kind of polynomials for GNFS: with a new degree of freedom, we further improve the size property. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm by exhibiting a better polynomial than the one used for the factorization of RSA-768, and a polynomial for RSA-1024 that outperforms the best published one.