Yahoo! purchased AlltheWeb from the Norwegian-based FAST company in 2003. At the time, AlltheWeb was the second largest database on the web, with over two billion pages indexed, and it was a viable competitor to Google, at least in terms of results if not public perception. That database size - now listed at 3.15 billion pages - and how the public sees it should only continue to increase due to Yahoo!'s backing.
Like Google, AlltheWeb has a simple design, but it also offers incredible search functionality and perhaps the best customization of any search engine. A huge database, fast and easily customized, AlltheWeb also offers dynamic clustering of results, real-time news searches, a "pre-analysis" tool that helps refine search queries, and an enhanced user interface.
Perhaps the best feature of this search engine is its educational effort to teach you how to search better via its pre-analysis tool. It trains you on how to better write your search queries by taking your search query and rewriting it onscreen. Also, you can turn off the rewrite feature. AlltheWeb has an outstanding news search feature, which allows you to search all the news categories, or pinpoint which news resources you want it to search. This feature will only get stronger as it is integrated with other Yahoo! properties.
AlltheWeb ties together its clustered results with the latest news stories on your query, and huge, frequently updated indexed database to pull from - these are strengths. When it merged with Yahoo!, several advanced features of the AlltheWeb database were dropped, including some of its field searching - like searching in the URL, and Boolean operators must now be upper case, and the size limit was restricted. Several languages were deleted, but Farsi was added. AlltheWeb used to allow the indexing of the full text of large web pages and PDF files - Yahoo!'s database now stops indexing at 500 kb - but unless you are searching for academic reports or government documents, you may not even notice this change. Perhaps Yahoo! will bring AlltheWeb advanced features back at a later stage since the necessary technology clearly exists.
AlltheWeb has added a "search tips box" that may appear to the right of search results. These are very helpful suggestions. AlltheWeb also provides all of the common search capabilities including Title, Boolean, link searching, language searching and you can even customize the page to search a group of languages of your own choosing. AlltheWeb offers other creatively unique features, like restricting your search to personal homepages.
AlltheWeb now uses Yahoo!'s database of multimedia picture and video catalogs, also MP3 music listings, and AlltheWeb still offers the unique ability to tie all of these tools together in its "universal search." It also has added a strong news search tool, with more than 3,000 sources. This can be date-searched and it is very robust.
Its new features include dynamic clustering of results and real-time news search. In the news search, you can also search within your results, a very useful feature. One truly unique and excellent feature is the URL Investigator, which was launched in 2003. It tells you more about a particular URL or domain name, including all the pages indexed within a domain. You can also jump to an Internet Archive link to see past versions of a page, discover related sub-domains, see when a page was last changed, the document size, and view all of that page's links it can find.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Landon Griffith at 08282010
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