AlltheWeb

» see alltheweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

alltheweb was the search engine you used when you wanted to feel smart about not just defaulting to google. in turkey around 2002 you would see it as a tab in the browsers of people on the donanimhaber forum threads, posted as proof they had checked elsewhere first. by 2005 even those tabs were closed.

the engine came out of fast search and transfer, a norwegian company spun out of doctorate research at the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim. the public web search launched mid-1999 under the brand alltheweb. by june 2002 the crawler had indexed over two billion pages, briefly more than google. fast also licensed the engine to other people's portals, including the search backend behind lycos in europe and the search behind dell.com.

overture bought fast's web search division for seventy million dollars in february 2003. yahoo bought overture itself five months later. that put alltheweb under the same roof as altavista, also acquired the same year, and yahoo's plan was always going to be to consolidate every search property into one yahoo backend. the alltheweb domain stayed up for eight years as a re-skinned yahoo search front-end before yahoo finally turned the redirect off on april 4, 2011.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

fast had real engineering credibility. the crawler was designed for scale from the start, and for about eighteen months between 2001 and 2002 alltheweb genuinely did have the largest index on the public web. it also shipped advanced operators that google did not match for years, plus a customizable result page that let you tune ranking factors yourself. for a small population of search-curious users, alltheweb felt like the version of search built by people who actually cared about the craft.

~ the fall ~

the problem was that for the other 99 percent of users, google was already plenty. the search-results-page feature comparison was a thing you cared about if you spent your day searching, and the average web user did not. google's pagerank ranking quality was good enough by 2001 that the index-size race was no longer the right race. fast figured this out around 2002 and pivoted the company toward enterprise search software, which was the line of business microsoft eventually paid 1.2 billion dollars for in 2008.

~ what got buried with it ~

fast's enterprise search software became microsoft's sharepoint search after the 2008 acquisition, then quietly faded from the product lineup over the next decade. the alltheweb consumer brand spent its last eight years as a wrapper around yahoo search, which was itself a wrapper around bing after 2009. by the time yahoo finally turned the alltheweb redirect off in april 2011, the engine that had once briefly out-indexed google was already two layers of brand removed from any actual fast technology. the trondheim crawler that started it all was long since rewritten to run inside microsoft sharepoint farms, which was a kinder fate than most search engines of the era got.

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