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Try AllTheWeb.
Norwegian search engine's faster and up to date
By Marty Beard
Stripped-down, super-quick search engine Google appeared out of nowhere about three years ago to quickly become a consumer favorite.
Founded by Stanford doctoral students in 1998, Google is consistently ranked as one of the web’s most visited sites, having moved ahead of search sites such as AltaVista.
But Google may soon be out-Googled.
Enter AllTheWeb.com, a relative upstart that is the creation of Norwegian internet search technology company Fast Search and Transfer, or FAST.
AllTheWeb is faster than Google, and the information it pulls up is more up-to-date.
And that makes it especially attractive for news searches.
"Google is currently a market-share leader, but FAST's technology and scalability make it a serious threat," says Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect, a company that helps other companies improve their search engine rankings.
"As more and more people discover these very strong capabilities and then discover that Google doesn't have them, Google is at risk," Marckini says.
Perhaps AllTheWeb’s main advantage over Google and other search engines is that its index gets updated more frequently.
FAST updates the AllTheWeb database every nine to 11 days, compared to 28 days for Google and 45 days for Inktomi.
AltaVista supposedly is updated every 45 to 60 days, but reports emerged last month that the troubled company had not updated its database since July.
Additionally, FAST’s technology is, well, fast.
The site can index up to 800 news stories a minute. And its index encompasses some 600 million web pages, 115 million multimedia files and two million MP3 files, among others.
"Fast has always been a neck-and-neck competitor with Google when comparing index size," says Lisa Wehr, president of OneUpWeb, another search engine-positioning firm.
"They continue to push themselves to add as many relevant sites as possible to their search results. By doing so, they have begun a campaign that positions them as purveyors of search results that are ‘the freshest in the world,’ a statement they seem to be living up to."
AllTheWeb has been online for two years, but two weeks ago or so it was relaunched with new features.
One is a news article search function that uses FAST’s technology to constantly scour some 3,000 online news sources.
For example, an AllTheWeb search yesterday on "Prince Charles" pulled up the latest news about the British royal. It's a story, filed Wednesday, of a Latvian teenager saying she was still unrepentant for an incident a month ago in which she hit the prince across the face with a carnation in protest of the war in Afghanistan.
A Google search calls up Prince Charles's official web site, which doesn’t exactly contain any juicy, up-to-the-minute tidbits.
"Which search results are more relevant? That will depend on the user's preference, but I suspect that the 'freshness' of a search engine's search results will be a key battleground in the near-term," Marckini says.
"AlltheWeb is closing the gap between stale and fresh news," says Rob Rubin, executive vice president and general manger of FAST’s internet division.
AllTheWeb, like its rivals, offers search results in many different languages, and it can recognize plain-English search queries à la AskJeeves.
To be sure, while AllTheWeb and other upstart search engines like it, among them teoma.com, are in hot pursuit of Google, Google is not exactly out of the running.
It has recently introduced new search features that let people find images and newsgroups.
And Google’s traffic far outstrips AllTheWeb’s. For the week ending Nov. 25, Google was the No. 9 property on the internet, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, with a unique audience of 7.7 million people, who spent an average of nine minutes 27 seconds on the site.
For the same week, AllTheWeb.com drew 145,000 unique visitors, who spent an average of five minutes 10 seconds on the site. In the past month, the site has attracted an average of 139,000 unique visitors a week.
"They're not yet well-known and haven't generated a buzz the way Google did. As a result, they do not have the market reach of Google," Marckini says.
AlltheWeb's ascendance is likely to be slow.
It has a partnership with Terra Lycos, in which Lycos banners appear on AllTheWeb’s search results pages. It also powers search results for companies including IBM, Reuters and eBay.
But it is not getting any major advertising push.
November 30, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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