AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google

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.

Comments

Simplicity not quantity.

[MarvinMouse]

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.

Re:Simplicity not quantity.

[SerpentMage]

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.

good not to have google monoculture

[kisrael]

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.

Nothing to write home about...

[peterdaly]

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

Pages indexed...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the search engine analog of MHz as a measure of CPU performance.

Where's TEOMA?

[Hheero]

I think i remember Teoma making the same claim, "we're better than Google.".
They should be featured on one of those shows - Where Are They Now?

Simple Interface

[creative_name]

I'll take Google's simple interface over the cluttered feel of AlltheWeb's any day. I don't know about AlltheWeb, but Google has so many cool tricks (phone number lookup, file search etc.) that it seems like I learn something new about Google almost every day. To AlltheWeb's credit, though, their search was fast, even comparable to Google's speed.

For now, I'll stick with Google though.

Targetted searching is needed, never mind size

[eXtro]

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, altavista and others. What I found was that the spike of interest in the movie 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.

Re:American Tech Companies

[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!

pop-up ad windows eliminated with Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

This Mozilla preference seems to eliminate pop-up advertisement windows without affecting the creation of new windows by user demand:

Edit -> Preferences

Advanced -> Scrupts & Windows

Uncheck "Open unrequested windows."