AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb is an Internet search engine that made its debut in mid-1999. 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 and Transfer, established on July 16, 1997.[1]  It was used primarily as a showpiece site for FAST's enterprise search engine. Although at one time rivaling Google in size and technology,[2]  AlltheWeb never became as popular.

When AlltheWeb started in 1999, Fast Search and Transfer aimed to provide their database to other search engines, copying the successful case of Inktomi. Indeed, 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 had a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look.[2][3][4] In February 2003 Fast's web search division was bought by Overture. In March 2004 Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!. Shortly after Yahoo!'s acquisition, the AlltheWeb site started using Yahoo!'s database and some of the advanced features were removed, such as FTP search.