AlltheWeb is a major search engine. It was debuted in mid-1999 introduced by Fast Search and Transfer and used primarily as a show piece site. Fast started their search engine in 1997. Although rivalling Google in size and technology, AlltheWeb never became as popular.
AlltheWeb in fact had a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look. 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.
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 grew from 80 million URIs to 200 million. Their aim was to index all the publicly-acessible 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 is famed for giving Google a run for its money. It often overtook Google in terms of the number of pages indexed, only to be outdone by the latter in a matter of a few days. Alltheweb is also famous for its simple page layout. One of the major problems with AlltheWeb is that it often throws up multiple links to different pages of the same site.
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