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

In other news ...

[Christianfreak]

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 :)

Enough with the Google worship, already.

[HEbGb]

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.

Re:Enough with the Google worship, already.

[Gutboy_Barrelhouse]

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.

Major, Major Flaw

[limekiller4]

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.

Re:Obvious Ads--bleah

[Mwongozi]

Google is currently listing Operation Clambake first.

Vote Google

[salmo]

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 ;-).