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The Internet

AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google 302

Posted by timothy from the necessary-but-is-it-sufficient dept.
An anonymous readers writes: "Hoping to attract more mass appeal for an online search engine with a cult following, Norwegian search engine AlltheWeb on Monday declared that it indexes more Internet information than longtime pacesetter Google. Boston.com has the story." Of course, pages indexed is not the only measure of a search engine and probably isn't even the most important.
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AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google More

AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google

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  • AllTheWeb (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bob McCown ( 8411 )
    This is the same AllTheWeb that has been buying banner ads that launch their website into pop-ups again and again...no thanks....
    • I don't think there's anything wrong with opening a new window when you click an add, it's not the same thing as a popup, and most of the time it's the choice of the website admin, not the advertizer.

      Also, lots of people prefer opening new sites in new windows. Myself included.
      • Also, lots of people prefer opening new sites in new windows. Myself included.

        But alot of us don't. Which is why you should let the user choose. Or even better, do what Google does and give you an option to have the windows open in a new window (if you get sick of right clicking each link).

  • ALL YOUR WEB PAGES ARE BELONG TO US! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:31AM (#3714774) Journal

    Great, you have a huge index. I know a haystack that has more than one needle, but the stack is about the size of Texas.


    • Being a Norwegian company, would they be under the same mandate to hand over all 'suspect' search queries for abuse by the US's new CIAFBINSASSSASD (known in PRSpeak as the Information Awareness Office)?
      • Being a Norwegian company, would they be under the same mandate to hand over all 'suspect' search queries for abuse by the US's new CIAFBINSASSSASD (known in PRSpeak as the Information Awareness Office)?

        I would hope not, but perhaps there might be a profit angle involved. [montypython.net]

        More seriously, do you have any knowlege that this "mandate" exists? Is it public law? Executive order? Secret executive order? A directive from "high levels"? Or is this more of an "intelligent concern" of yours? There's nothing wrong with that - everyone with half a brain should be concerned about these possibilities.
    • Once again proving, it's not the size of your index, it's how you use it!

      *ahem*

  • Simplicity not quantity. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MarvinMouse ( 323641 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:32AM (#3714780) Homepage Journal
    Well, I think this might finally answer the question I have been wondering about my love of google for a long time.

    Do I love google because it's so simple and easy to use with very quick download times and simple graphic interfaces, and good search algorithms that more often then not give me the sites that I am looking for in one page.

    or Do I love google because it has a ton of useful sites logged in its database including all copies, half sites, under construction sites, etc.?

    I am willing to say that's it's likely the first one, and I think that it might be that for most other people.

    But either way, it'll be neat to see what AllTheWeb.com does well.
    • Exactly. I did a search for "real estate Alsace" in the database and it found all of the ones that google did.

      The only problem was it found many real estate sites within the US, and other places. And these places have absolutely nothing to with the Alsace

      What I also love with google is that it will translate my english searches into the appropriate language search. So Real Estate becomes "immoblier", which brings up another ton of results.

      It is the little touches that keeps me coming back to google.

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by eaeolian ( 560708 )
    Ya think *somebody* might be compensating for something here?

  • Less webpages (Score:5, Funny)

    by oever ( 233119 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:33AM (#3714785) Homepage
    The ultimate test: how many webpages about me:

    Google: 185
    AllTheWeb: 57

    I'll stick with google. It indexes more interesting stuff. ;^)
    • I like the Image Search [alltheweb.com] better than google's.
    • I get an even bigger difference if I use my full name

      Google 7,760. Search took 0.39 seconds
      AllTheWeb 1,761

      However if I search on only my surname (which is very rare) I get

      Google about 11,000. All the Web 11,374

      This basically corresponds to cases where I am cited by first initial only.

      This indicates to me that Google has much more accurate discrimination functions on cross matches.

    • A search for my name: :-)
      • Google: 2,750
      • Alltheweb: 1,023.

      AOL. Actually, I've been using alltheweb from time to time. It has happened that it has been able to dig up some really obscure things that Google hasn't found, but generally, I find that if there are at least twenty pages likely to come up with the search words, Google does a whole lot better job ranking them. That really counts a lot.

  • Obvious Ads--bleah (Score:4, Informative)

    by dalassa ( 204012 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:33AM (#3714788) Journal
    Unfortunatly their ads are at the top of the page, followed by "top news" and then the links themselves.
    However the first two returns for Scientology are the Scientology homepage and Operation Clambake. I wonder how long it will be before AllTheWeb is threatened.

    Aside I'll need more proof that this thing is more accurate than google before I would consider switching.

    • Re:Obvious Ads--bleah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mwongozi ( 176765 )
      Google is currently listing Operation Clambake first [google.com].

    • I wonder how long it will be before AllTheWeb is threatened.

      Could be interesting, since AllTheWeb is based in Norway, the same country where Operation Clambake is. They might say "DMCA, what?"

      But then, they might not, since the index itself is probably in the US, and besides, our Big Sister Sunde thinks DMCA is Norwegian law anyway, so she'll be banging on the doors once she gets $cientology on the phone.

  • yeah but.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by SeicheWarning ( 560802 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:35AM (#3714795)
    are they going to have any cutesy cartoons made out of their name for special occasions?

  • good not to have google monoculture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:35AM (#3714798) Homepage
    Well, I was pretty happy with the results of a search on my name...happier than with Google in that once case, though that's but a single tiny datapoint.

    In any case, it would be terrific to have a viable alternative to Google...despite Google's almost unnerving ability to do *so* many things Right, it is good to have somewhere to turn just in case something went wrong there. Not having a monoculture (which is what we're almost on the verge of with Google) is generally a good thing.
    • Well, I was pretty happy with the results of a search on my name...happier than with Google in that once case, though that's but a single tiny datapoint.

      Funny, my name didn't even get a hit, whereas it's the first match on Google. But, like you say, it's a tiny datapoint. I'll stick with Google though.

  • American Tech Companies (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:36AM (#3714803)
    The story says AlltheWeb.com is owned by a Norwegian company. Should people really support a socialist Scandinavian country? Any real American should only use capitalist homeland-based search engines, like Google [google.com] or MSN Search [msn.com]. Like Bush says, "You're either with us or against us." Only a traitor would go against Bush's wisdom. What are you, AN AMERICAN TALIBAN?
    • > What are you, AN AMERICAN TALIBAN?
      No. I'm English - and you're a colonial who has a drinking song [lib.ak.us] for a national anthem.

    • Re:American Tech Companies (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well Last time I checked, the Scandinavian countries were market economies and parliamentary democracies..

      Just cuz our chicks are hot and our health care is free doesn't mean you have to get your panties in a bunch and start throw the socialist label around!

      3 cheers for scando chicks!

  • Nothing to write home about... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <{petedaly} {at} {ix.netcom.com}> on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:37AM (#3714808)
    I just did some searches, and it appears to be ok for finding information. Whether it's logic is as good as google's is hard to tell. Little slower than google. It doesn't look to me like there is any reason to use it over google. How many sites worth visiting are not in google's index?

    This may be a case of a company picking a poor benchmark as their performance measurment. Google's draw is their great ranking logic, not index size.

    -Pete

  • In other news ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Christianfreak ( 100697 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:40AM (#3714822) Homepage Journal
    Windows declares itself better than linux,
    Gnome declares itself better than KDE
    Emacs declares itself better than VI
    PHP declares itself better than Perl ...

    Let the flames fly :)

  • How does this work? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sludge ( 1234 ) <slashdot@NosPaM.tossed.org> on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:40AM (#3714823) Homepage
    I did some searches, and I ended up with different results than google. Perhaps of note, the results I got with alltheweb are from 1998, whereas google's are from this year.
    • Yeah, I've noticed google will have a fairly recent version of a page available when searching, even pages that you wouldn't expect to be updated all that often. (you would expect news sites to be crawled at least daily, but not some off website in the middle of nowehere).

      One thing I will give google a hand for is there ability/choice to not have to have large graphical ads anywhere. AllTheWeb has a banner ad at the top of each page, and another one that appears beside your search results. It is mildly annoying, and if it proves better, could be tolerable. Google's slim environment is very appealing though.

      I'll have to try AllTheWeb for a little bit first and see if it suits my needs before I can give a better evaluation than this.

    • Re:How does this work? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Coolfish ( 69926 )
      i did an even simpler test. I searched for "monkeys" - google returned interesting results all from different websites in the first 10 results. AllTheWeb returned 10 pages, SIX of which were all on the same domain, shacknews.com, and all of them had NOTHING to do with monkeys!

      This search engine can't even find monkeys, then forget about it.
  • Google counts as a single page both their cache and the site in it's current form, so the number of web pages you can get to from a google search is significantly higher than the number of pages they have actualy 'indexed'.

    This is far more important to me as a user than some extra pages that alltheweb may have (presumably because they ignored a few 'nobots' tags? that Google's crawlers respected?)
  • I'll stick with Google for the following reasons:
    • Lighter interface
    • Adverts are less intrusive
    • Has a cache in case the site gets slashdotted or taken offline by the Scientoligists ;-)
    • I like the special occasion cartoons
    • It appears to be clued in to what people want
    • I am used to it and biased :-p
  • I'm too spoiled by Google, I think. I took one glance at the search results screen that had a few banner ads, and decided never to go there again. I understand they want to offset costs/make money off of the engine, but banner ads are ugly as sin. I'll stick with Google.

  • Where's TEOMA? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hheero ( 584573 )
    I think i remember Teoma [teoma.com] making the same claim, "we're better than Google.".
    They should be featured on one of those shows - Where Are They Now?

  • Enough with the Google worship, already. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HEbGb ( 6544 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:49AM (#3714882)
    God forbid someone presents an objective comparison between Alltheweb and Google. Responses such as "Google is my God" and Timothy's little snip in the article do nothing for anyone really interested in using a useful search engine.

    I just used Alltheweb for some common searches I do, and you know what? It found a lot more useful hits than Google did. Yea, imagine that.

    But Alltheweb didn't seem to have a cache, which I thought was very useful in Google.

    So, come on, folks, give it a chance, and don't jump to conclusions without an objective analysis. The tendency to blindly worship things like google/linux/linus/transmeta is far too common on this site.
    • The tendency to blindly worship things like google/linux/linus/transmeta is far too common on this site.

      Well, look at it this way... if you want to look at a fan site for something else, go there. Don't expect everyone to be completely objective. Fact of the matter is that most people who are subjective, are vocal about said topics. Folks that don't care, or don't want to inadvertently press anyone into anything generally don't peep.

    • ...the object of claimed affection really IS as good as everyone says.

      And, Google forbid, should google start to suck, or something else start to be better, then I think most of us would find another search engine to "worship", like I (and I assume many others) did when Yahoo went down the toilet.

      For me, the one mention of pop-ups and heavy graphic ads is more than enough to make it not worth my while to check out (and yes, I know, at home, I can filter out all the banner ad and pop-up garbage, but here at work I don't have the luxury of arbitrarily installing proxies and browsers to do that sort of thing. besides, web sites that use pop-ups piss me off).
    • The tendency to blindly worship things like google/linux/linus/transmeta is far too common on this site.

      Yeah! *looks around* Fuck Transmeta!

    • Re:Enough with the Google worship, already. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gutboy_Barrelhouse ( 260624 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @11:42AM (#3715555)
      Timothy's little snip offers at least as much as your post. He's just pointing out that pages indexed is (only) one measure of a search tool. That's a starting point - what are some others? Another poster mentioned up-to-dateness of the pages returned. That's good. Clean interface is another one. Features like a cache, which you mention, are another. Response time, configurability, documentation, what else?

      Other than that you just say that alltheweb gave more hits for you on a couple of searches. That's a pretty useless measure of search tool quality to anyone else.

      For my part I'm not sure what would make me switch from Google. I really value their interface, and none of the recent challengers are preferable to me in that regard. I switched TO Google because IMO it was a big leap in result quality over the earlier generation, but until we start using personalized intelligent agents, I'm hard pressed to imagine how a new engine could produce as big a leap. Basically, as search engine quality improves, for most people the sample of searches that they'd have to do in order for a comparison to produce clearly discriminable results also grows. Will very many Google users really sit down and do like 50 searches with both it and AllTheWeb, on the chance that ATW proves slightly better? I doubt it, and I'd hate to have to be in the planning room of a Google competitor, trying to think of the killer app that could get people to switch with just a few searches.

      Though I'd certainly switch if I could have the Librarian from Snow Crash.

  • when a search for

    "php regular expression" AND "tutorial"

    on AllTheWeb gives me 131 results, with more than half being a reference to a PHP website manual (and even a dislaimer footer because it had the words "PHP" and "and" in it ???). Moreover, it took my "and" literally as a search criteria, though my advance searching techniques could probably use a bit of help ;)

    In comparison, Google gives me 73 links (without omitted results showing) with many results displaying ALL my keywords in bold and not ONE of them using "and" as a keyword.

    Dunno, I'm probably a bit biased anyway since "Google" types out so much easier for me (repetition i guess) than "alltheweb".

    pblt....

    • RTFM (Score:2, Informative)

      by Hellkitten ( 574820 )

      There is actually a help link. "php regular expression" + "tutorial" would have given you what you wanted. If you want to compare two tools you should at least use enough time to see if you have to use the two differently, and then see what is best at getting the job done.

  • Higher for a reason... (Score:2, Informative)

    by coene ( 554338 )
    Because it indexes all of the domain names of the same site as different hosts.

    Google returns one accurate site for the company "DataHive", one domain name (not the proper one, but how would it know =)

    This site returns 3 different domains, and tries to present them as different pages, though they all have the same content.

    I can imagine its easy to claim more than google when you multiply the number of real hits.

    I must say though, the results I found were pretty good for a number of queries. Definetly a google competitor. It does not seem to find all of the newsgroup/mailing-list stuff that google returns, good or bad depending on what you are searching for.

    Its nice to have another competant option ;)
    • Just make sure to click the link in the upper right that says: "Offensive Content Reduction: On" before you want to search for some good porno. It does admit the filter probably is not the greatest, but it's nice to see it applied. Google offers a similar feature on their images search, but not for the content.

      I have a feeling this could be similar to the recent Hotmail changes, where a friend of mine with the last name Hancock was told he had to change his last name because it violated their rules. Same went for someone with the last name Hacker. When filtering like that you have to be very careful, because just because something is a naughty word in one context, doesn't mean it is in every context.

  • Targetted searching is needed, never mind size (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eXtro ( 258933 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:52AM (#3714901) Homepage
    When I saw Gladiator I was wondering how much of the story was actually historically accurate. I don't own an encyclopedia so I did a bit of research on the web. I looked up some of the main historical characters, Emperor Commodus, Marcus Aurelius and others, using google [google.com], altavista [altavista.com] and others. What I found was that the spike of interest in the movie [imdb.com] had completely swamped out any historical results. I had to wade through pages and pages of hits before I finally started getting to information that was useful in my context.


    Google is my favourite search engine, even now, its ads are unobtrusive and don't pollute the search results. They've been good net citizens and they've done substantial research into how to better search. There results are typically the best as well.


    In this case their search results were very broken however, at least for the purposes of my search. What I'd like to see is google, or an engine as effective as google, add in the ability to constrain your search to subject areas. In this instance I'd constrain my search to historical sites and would have received mostly uncorrupted hits. This is different than a web directory. Web directories don't classify sites based on there quality. Google does in a round about fashion, it lists sites with more people linking to it higher than sites with less links.


    I'm not sure how the details of this would work, self-nomination would not necessarily work. Porn companies would gladly pollute the keywords on the off chance that somebody looking for history would buy a membership to their site. Letting individuals vote a site into or out of a keyword might work, though you'd be in danger of concerted efforts to say vote out anti-Scientologist information and vote in pro-Scientologist information when both actually could be under a religious keyword.


    Anyway, linking to more sites isn't necessarily helpful in my opinion. What I'd prefer is the ability to narrow the focus of my searches.

  • The true test (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @09:54AM (#3714915)
    Search for "sex":

    Google: 63,500,000
    AllTheWeb: 25,435,205

    I think I'll stick with Google :o)

    • Well, I think there both rubbish.

      I searched for "Juliette Binoche tits" on the image search of both sites (with filtering turned off in both cases) and neither returned satisfactory results.
    • So since google searches 2,073,418,204 webpagees, and you got 63,500,000, that means that 3.6% of the web is at least somewhat "sex" related, and this doesnt mean porn either, just instances of the word sex. So the internet is hardly the haven of pr0n fiends that it once was (slashdot notwithstanding)
  • More pages means more crap and shitty search results. Similar to programming, more lines of code doesn't mean better.
  • After all, that's the true test of a search engine! :) Hmm...still up. Come on people! Stress test those servers!

    No cache. No images. No thanks.

    :Peter

  • Cached here (Score:5, Funny)

    by GothChip ( 123005 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @10:02AM (#3714959) Homepage
    For those who are unable to reach AllTheWeb here is the homepage through the usual Google [google.co.uk] cache.

  • Major, Major Flaw (Score:4, Interesting)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @10:04AM (#3714965) Homepage
    I just tried to pull up one of my own pages [alltheweb.com] with this engine. Got:

    "Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page."

    Which, as near as I can tell, is their way of throttling commercial hits. Wonderful. Moving the mouse over the link doesn't reveal the address in the bottom bar, either, so the only way I can think of to obtain the address of the item it matches is by right-clicking and selecting 'copy link address', opening a new window and pasting it it (and having a browser that is capable of doing this), then editing the URL so only the target link text remains.

    You can't even right-lick and open in a new window to do this. If you try, you get "about:blank" which, afaik, means they're using javascript.

    These people sure go through a lot pains to render a result and then not let you anywhere near it. Saying they're bigger than Google is a bit like someone bragging about how their PDP-11 is bigger than my Athlon. Cripes.
    • I'm guessing you are using Mozilla.

      The link does the same thing to me when using 1.1alpha on Win2k SP2+ (My primary browser and platform).

      Internet Explorer 6 follows the link with no problems.

      So I'd say it's a browser issue and not a web page issue.
      • I'm guessing you are using Mozilla.

        The link does the same thing to me when using 1.1alpha on Win2k SP2+ (My primary browser and platform).

        Internet Explorer 6 follows the link with no problems.

        So I'd say it's a browser issue and not a web page issue.

        I got the same error he got when using mozilla so I looked at the source and it's not javascript coming from that page. I followed the link and got the same error so I decided to telnet to port 80 and check out the source on the page and this is what I got:

        telnet www.alltheweb.com 80
        Trying 66.77.74.20...
        Connected to www.alltheweb.com.
        Escape character is '^]'.
        GET /go/1/H/web/http/www.kaosinc.com/jen.shtml HTTP/1.0

        HTTP/1.1 302 Found
        Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 16:27:31 GMT
        Server: Apache/1.3.24 (Unix) PHP/4.2.0-atw
        X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.0-atw
        Location: http://www.kaosinc.com/jen.shtml
        Connection: close
        Content-Type: text/html

        Your browser does not support HTTP redirects.

        click here [kaosinc.com] to reach http://www.kaosinc.com/jen.shtml [kaosinc.com].
        Connection closed by foreign host.

        Looks fine to me.... the 302 (redirect) should be working fine. I wanted to try with IE but my laptop seems to be having somenetwork problems at the moment.

        Very, very strange...
        • It doesn't seem to be a problem with alltheweb.com, your webserver seems to be stuck in some sort of 302 loop. It keeps redirecting to itself.


          telnet www.kaosinc.com 80
          Trying 192.203.175.245...
          Connected to www.kaosinc.com.
          Escape character is '^]'.
          GET /index.shtml HTTP/1.0

          HTTP/1.1 302 Found
          Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 16:51:47 GMT
          Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2 ApacheJServ/1.1.2
          Location: http://www.kaosinc.com/index.shtml
          Connection: close
          Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

          302 Found

          Found
          The document has moved here [kaosinc.com].


          Connection closed by foreign host.

    • Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page.

      That is a Mozilla error message (source [mozilla.org]) and does not come from alltheweb. Your web server is broken. http://www.kaosinc.com/jen.shtml redirects [mozilla.org] to http://www.kaosinc.com/index.shtml, which then redirects [mozilla.org] to itself. This happens regardless of where I find the link to http://www.kaosinc.com/jen.shtml, or what browser I use to load it. IE appears to just sit there, Opera bounces between various stages of trying to connect, and Netscape 4 gives up after a few redirects and displays a raw 302-found page ("The document has moved _here_") without redirecting.

      Moving the mouse over the link doesn't reveal the address in the bottom bar, either, so the only way I can think of to obtain the address of the item it matches is by right-clicking and selecting 'copy link address', opening a new window and pasting it it (and having a browser that is capable of doing this), then editing the URL so only the target link text remains.

      An easier way to see the URL of the link is to hold the mouse down over the link, and then move off of the link before you lift the mouse button. But I still get the infinite-redirect error message if I type your URL directly.

      You can't even right-lick and open in a new window to do this. If you try, you get "about:blank" which, afaik, means they're using javascript.

      If I right-click on a link from the alltheweb search results and select "open link in new window", I see http://www.alltheweb.com/go/1/H/web/http/www.kaosi nc.com/jen.shtml in the location bar and get the same error message. What version of Mozilla are you using?

  • AllTheWeb _has_ one advantage (Score:3, Informative)

    by rainer_d ( 115765 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @10:19AM (#3715029) Homepage
    Even if you totally discard it as a Web-Search-Engine, the FTP-Search [alltheweb.com] is still one of the best.
    It was hidden as ftpsearch.lycos.com for some time, but now it seems to have come "home".
    BTW: the last time their OS was visible through the firewall, it was FreeBSD...

    Anyone remember archie ?

  • True, indexed pages on the internet is not the single most important thing for a search engine. But it is definitely up there in the top. Personally I would preffer more indexed pages before most other things one can measure a search engine, simply because then I know there's a greater chance to find what I'm looking for, even if maybe it will be a little more difficult.

  • How about the image search then? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @10:22AM (#3715041) Journal
    I'll just say this:

    Google manage to get a graph of the slashdot effect [google.com] among the first 20 hits, while AllTheWeb just manage to get Cliff showing a Think Unix book [alltheweb.com] (in weirdo hawaiian clothes). :-)

    I don't know about you, but Google give me more relevant matches as usual. ;-)
  • My completely unscientific and extremely quick and biased test resulted in a failing grade for this search engine. A search for mttlg (English only) brought up lots of stuff, most of it correctly, but it completely missed mttlg.net and its previous incarnations (they aren't even indexed). It did turn up plenty of /. posts, some of which link to mttlg.net, as well as some pages from a free web hosting service that I used to use but can't do anything with anymore (the service is essentially dead, but you can't tell this until you log in and try to use it...).

    Worse than the outdated and useless search results is the way they are presented - there is no grouping by site to put similar pages under one entry. Of the 167 results, almost all of them are from two distinct sites, but you have to wade through all of them to find any different ones. With a more common search string, it will be almost impossible to find what you are looking for, and it is still difficult with a narrow focus search. Google ain't going down that easy...


  • ..is bigger than your index.

    Computer scientists - pfft...

  • Today the New York Times claimed that it had published "All the News That's Fit to Print."

    One question remains unanswered: Will they be able to do it again tomorrow?

    Note to moderators: This is sarcasm. It isn't off-topic. I'm implying that some marketing ploy by alltheweb.com isn't exactly newsworthy. Thank you.

  • If you are looking for something really specific (eg. the DNS entry of your machine to see which webpages you look at publish log files), then alltheweb in my experience will find a number of pages which google misses.

    For general searching google still rocks.

  • The old saying holds true: (Score:3, Funny)

    by nemesisj ( 305482 ) on Monday June 17, 2002 @10:50AM (#3715223) Homepage


    It's not how big it is, it's how you use it.

    Google is still way more useful in my opinion.

  • Alltheweb's claims are not unfounded, and I find it always worth checking when google fails.

    Here [sourceforge.net] is one of several real life cases where it found software for me that google didn't.

    (It still does [alltheweb.com], and google still doesn't [google.com].)

  • Pr0n search [alltheweb.com] with alltheweb.com, 48,518 results found.

    Google Pr0n Search [google.com] finds 46,200 results.

    Searching for pr0n via alltheweb.com leads to 2318 more potential pieces of pr0n to be seen.

  • Vote Google (Score:5, Interesting)

    by salmo ( 224137 ) <mikesalmo @ h o t mail.com> on Monday June 17, 2002 @11:14AM (#3715360) Homepage Journal
    The reason I'm for Google has little to do with technology. It has everything to do with advertisements and capitalism.

    I'd rather support a company that uses subtle advertisements like Google does than a company that uses in your face banner ads, etc. (Then again I'm posting on Slashdot!) Also I make a point to check out the ads evey now and then on Google and visit the company's site. I may be getting hosting from an advertiser on Google soon.

    If people who advertise on Google make more money than they do with banner ads, pop-ups, etc. then we'll see the idea spread. I don't like in-my-face ads, so I do what I can to tell companies that. It's called being a responsible consumer.

    Plus more valid hits come up when I search for myself on Google ;-).
  • Comes up with more hits for my name then google.

    I can't belive how many people have my "Subtle mind control? why do all the HTML buttons say 'submit'" quote on their sites.
    • I can't belive how many people have my "Subtle mind control? why do all the HTML buttons say 'submit'" quote on their sites.

      Have you seen this? Submit [randomfoo.net]

  • Not entirely fair (Score:2, Interesting)

    by palmech13 ( 59124 )
    Sure AllTheWeb may have more links, but when I did a search on my name, I found several hits on pages that haven't existed for many moons. Every search engine has this problem, but Google has long since flushed those pages. And in the time between the page vanishing and Google noticing, they've got it cached. :)

    Of course, as has been mentioned a few times above, competition is a Good Thing (TM).

    - Ardenstone

  • THE (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FFNieko ( 554931 )
    Norwegian search engine AlltheWeb on Monday declared that it indexes more Internet information than longtime pacesetter Google.

    Then how come the word with the most search results (FYI: the) on Google [google.com], returns less results on alltheweb [alltheweb.com]?

  • Main Pages Found (Score:2, Interesting)

    by highlander123 ( 582572 )
    Google always seems to give me what I want, faster than anything else. Either this is because of it's search algorythms, or that it has only the indexes linked... example : I search for engsoc (looking for Canadian Univerisity Engineering Societies) and I find all the "main" entry pages with google, and I find a littering of "inside" pages with obscure titles with this new one. I'll stick with google-- and my chances of using the "i feel lucky" button are high, since the first or second link.
  • 'Clive, we need some way to get a lot of heavy computer users to our new spiffy search engine...'

    'I've got it Herbert! Let's make some inflammatory claim about Google that has nothing to do with the actual quality of either sites results and sit back and watch the hits roll in!'

    yeah, so it's an obvious troll, but i guarantee you it's true.

  • I searched both Google and AllTheWeb for the name of my company. (For privacy reasons, I'm not going to tell you the name.) We are a small company, and probably few pages on the web link to our site, but Google pulled up our home page as its first search result. AllTheWeb failed to list it in its first page of links.

    It's not hard to find our site, either. Our company's name is "foo bars"* and our URL is "foobars.com." Google nailed it, while AllTheWeb bombed.

    Doing a more complex search with lots of words from our home page did, finally, get AllTheWeb to cough up our site. So I know it's in there.

    So in my opinion it has little to do with how big their index is. It has to do with how good they are at finding what I'm looking for. For me, Google almost always finds what I'm looking for. I've even started using the "I Feel Lucky" button to skip the search results altogether and just take me straight to the first listed site.

    *Incidentally, I've always wanted to open a pub called the Foo Bar, but I don't think many people would get it.
  • This did return more results for some search terms than google. Not many of the extras seemed all that useful, though. The signal to noise ratio seems a bit lower.

    The ordering of pages seems less helpful. In many cases, the page I'm looking for is farther down the page.

    The sponsored links and advertising are way more noticeable, and get in the way of the search results, although they're probably easy enough to ignore.

    Google seems to be better at rating by search term proximity, under the useful assumption that if the search terms occur close to each other, it is less likely to be a random hit. One irritation with AllTheWeb is that for many results, it doesn't show you the context of the search terms in the summary.

    Obviously AllTheWeb lacks the excellent USENET archive. The video and MP3 search festures might be pretty useful, I haven't had a chance to try them.

    I realize I'm coming across as entirely pro-Google, but these are the only observations I have right now. I'll give AllTheWeb a chance, and let internet darwinism settle the issue.

  • alltheweb claims (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BadTuna ( 575923 )
    Do a search for slashdot GOOGLE = 2,250,000 AllTheWeb = 1,649,088 What's up with that ?
  • Years ago, I used to use ftpsearch to find warez left in public incoming dirs by warez couriers.

    Glad to see it's back, after a sojourn as a non working component of Lycos.
  • The reason why AllTheWeb will surpass google is that it has a much catchier name.

    As a bonus, alltheweb (when properly separtaed with spaces) is proper English.
  • come on, we all know that *cough* it isn't the size that matters, but how well you use it to um, achieve results.

    :)

  • A small test (Score:2, Informative)

    by Loki ( 625 )
    Let's look at the numbers shall we?

    Fnord: Google: 104000 AllTheWeb: 46439
    Cheese: Google: 3690000 AllTheWeb: 7718252
    Linux: Google: 48000000 AllTheWeb: 26670311
    Windows: Google: 44600000 AllTheWeb: 66545303
    Extropian: Google: 4460 AllTheWeb: 3999
    Kumquat: Google: 32600 AllTheWeb: 42889
    Question Authority and the authorities will question you.: Google: 90 AllTheWe b: 74
    Hot man meat: Google: 229 AllTheWeb: 1661
    Hot pussy: Google: 104000 AllTheWeb: 770057

    "undefined reference to" error: Google: 31700 AllTheWeb: 8548
    "Antimatter-Catalyzed MicroFission / Fusion": Google: 6 AllTheWeb: 1

    Surprisingly alltheweb does return more hits in some areas, most notably for che ese, windows, and pr0n. With the cheese test, AllTheWeb helpfully cluttered my s creen with a banner for food products. Google, thankfully, is still bannerless, and returns more linux hits, fnords, and Voltaire quotes. Alltheweb also stalled several times and I had to resubmit a search. Conclusion: If you're a linux gee k or you want to know about fnords, futuristic philosophies, compilation errors, or advanced space propulsion concepts, google is better. If you're a horny wind ows user and want to find gay or straight pr0n, and if you for some reason like kumquats and want to learn more about cheese, use alltheweb.

    Seriously, I'll probably stick with google, better numbers or no. The only thing AllTheWeb has going for it is the ftp search. The original is owned by lycos no w and broken.
  • ...is how often they include cute, relevant, wacky different variations on their logo.

    Right?
  • Hey, check out one of the new Google beta programs, answers.google.com [google.com] Even you can now earn fame and fortune, and yes, even internet cash be searching google's archives for answers to people's questions...
  • here [washingtonpost.com].

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