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AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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.

15 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. In other news ... by Christianfreak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)

    --
    The Anti-Blog
  2. Google needs some competition... by Jacer · · Score: 1, Interesting

    but I'm sure google is faster, and it's results probably match better to what you were looking for, in anycase it'll be intresting to see

    --
    --fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
  3. Enough with the Google worship, already. by HEbGb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Enough with the Google worship, already. by Gutboy_Barrelhouse · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

  4. Major, Major Flaw by limekiller4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just tried to pull up one of my own pages 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.

    --
    My .02,
    Limekiller
  5. Re:Obvious Ads--bleah by Mwongozi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Google is currently listing Operation Clambake first.

  6. Re:American Tech Companies by DrVxD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > What are you, AN AMERICAN TALIBAN?
    No. I'm English - and you're a colonial who has a drinking song for a national anthem.

    --
    Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
  7. Vote Google by salmo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ;-).

  8. Not entirely fair by palmech13 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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

  9. THE by FFNieko · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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, returns less results on alltheweb?

  10. Main Pages Found by highlander123 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:Google still #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Alltheweb's technology is or atleast was better. Google uses 4000+ linux boxes where alltheweb uses(used) about 400 servers running freebsd. I could explain exactly how alltheweb's tech works, but I don't think my IP agreement would allow it :)

  12. comments on AllTheWeb by OpenMind(tm) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  13. alltheweb claims by BadTuna · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Do a search for slashdot GOOGLE = 2,250,000 AllTheWeb = 1,649,088 What's up with that ?

    --
    Your sig here!
  14. my reason to prefer alltheweb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    is that it allows me to download its search result pages from within a PHP script. I wrote it to get a concordance (list of real usage cases) for any phrase from within Emacs, and it works flawlessly with alltheweb (and greatly facilitates writing in English for a non-native speaker like me). I tried to hook up to Google in the same way, but it refused to share its wisdom with my script, apparently because the user_agent field was not that of a "real" browser. I find this rather stupid - what are they afraid of, robots stealing their bandwidth? Any robot can easily fake its user_agent, I was just a bit too lazy for this hack. And besides, alltheweb works just fine for me.