AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb

Screenshot of AlltheWeb
Type of site
Web search engine
Website www.alltheweb.com/search
Launched July 16, 1999 (1999-07-16) (as Fast)
Current status Closed

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.[1] 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.[2] AlltheWeb never became as popular as Google, though, and its userbase declined after it was bought out by Overture in 2003.

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[2] 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.[2][3][4] 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.[5]

See also

References

  1. "Gemini No.1 January 1999". NTNU. Retrieved 2006-06-18.
  2. 1 2 3 "FAST's ALLTHEWEB.COM dethrones Google as the world's largest search engine" (Press release). Fast Search & Transfer. 2002-06-17. Archived from the original on 27 December 2006. Retrieved 2006-12-17.
  3. "Fast launches ALLTHEWEB.COM Alchemist customized search tool" (Press release). Fast Search & Transfer. 2006-06-25. Archived from the original on 25 December 2006. Retrieved 2006-12-17.
  4. "AllTheWeb Now A Better Search Experience Than Google". Microdoc News. 2002-06-17. Archived from the original on 2003-07-04. Retrieved 2006-12-17.
  5. Rao, Leena (March 18, 2011). "The Sun Will Set For Yahoo's AlltheWeb On April 4". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 13 April 2011. Retrieved April 6, 2011.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/10/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.