AlltheWeb was an Internet search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 that made its debut in mid-1999. It grew out of FTP Search, Tor Egge's doctorate

Doctorate

A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...

 thesis

Thesis

A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...

 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology , commonly known as NTNU, is located in Trondheim. NTNU is the second largest of the eight universities in Norway, and, as its name suggests, has the main national responsibility for higher education in engineering and technology...

, which he started in 1994, which in turn resulted in the formation of Fast Search and Transfer, established on July 16, 1997. It was used primarily as a showpiece site for FAST's enterprise search engine. Although at one time rivaling Google in size and technology, AlltheWeb never became as popular.

Traits

When AlltheWeb started in 1999, Fast Search and Transfer aimed to provide their database to other search engines, copying the successful case of Inktomi

Inktomi

Inktomi Corporation was a California company that provided software for Internet service providers. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the search engine they developed...

. Indeed, in January 2000, Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

 used their results in the Lycos PRO search. By that time, the AlltheWeb database had grown from 80 million URI

Uniform Resource Identifier

In computing, a uniform resource identifier is a string of characters used to identify a name or a resource on the Internet. Such identification enables interaction with representations of the resource over a network using specific protocols...

s to 200 million. Their aim was to index all the publicly-accessible 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 had a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look. Its image search would also take you directly to the image rather than to the page where it was displayed, making for a faster image search. In February 2003 Fast's web search division was bought by Overture

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based "Pay per click" or "Sponsored search" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!.Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc....

.

Closure

In March 2004 Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

. Shortly after Yahoo!'s acquisition, the AlltheWeb site started using Yahoo!'s database and some of the advanced functions were removed, such as FTP

File Transfer Protocol

File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

 search and direct image search. In March 2011, Yahoo! stated on the AlltheWeb website that they intend to close the engine. Starting on April 4, 2011, the site redirected to Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was , the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications....

.