Type of site Web search engine | Current status Closed | |
 | ||
Website www.alltheweb.com/search Launched July 16, 1999; 17 years ago (1999-07-16) (as Fast) | ||
AlltheWeb was an Internet search engine that made its debut in mid-1999 and was closed in 2011. It grew out of FTP Search, Tor Egge's doctorate thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which he started in 1994, which in turn resulted in the formation of Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), established on July 16, 1997. It was used primarily as a showpiece site for FAST's enterprise search engine. According to FAST, AllTheWeb once rivaled Google in size and technology. AlltheWeb never became as popular as Google, though, and its userbase declined after it was bought out by Overture in 2003.
Contents
Traits
When AlltheWeb started in 1999, FAST aimed to provide their database to other search engines, copying the successful case of Inktomi. In January 2000, Lycos used their results in the Lycos PRO search. By that time, the AlltheWeb database had grown from 80 million URIs to 200 million. Their aim was to index all the publicly accessible web. Their crawler indexed over 2 billion pages by June 2002 and started a fresh round of the search engine size war. Before their purchase by Yahoo!, the database contained about 3.3 billion URIs.
AlltheWeb claimed a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look. Its image search would also take the viewer directly to the image rather than to the page where it was displayed.
Closure
In February 2003 FAST's web search division was bought by Overture. In March 2004, Overture was taken over by Yahoo!. Shortly after Yahoo!'s acquisition, the AlltheWeb site started using Yahoo!'s database and some of the advanced functions were removed, such as FTP search and direct image search. In March 2011, Yahoo! stated on the AlltheWeb website that they intend to close the engine. Starting on April 4, 2011, the site redirected to Yahoo! Search.