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

ALL YOUR WEB PAGES ARE BELONG TO US!

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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.

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.

Less webpages

[oever]

The ultimate test: how many webpages about me:

Google: 185
AllTheWeb: 57

I'll stick with google. It indexes more interesting stuff. ;^)

Obvious Ads--bleah

[dalassa]

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.

yeah but..

[SeicheWarning]

are they going to have any cutesy cartoons made out of their name for special occasions?

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.

American Tech Companies

[Anonymous Coward]

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 or MSN Search. 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?

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 :)

How does this work?

[Sludge]

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.

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.

The true test

[Mr_Silver]

Search for "sex":

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

I think I'll stick with Google :o)

Cached here

[GothChip]

For those who are unable to reach AllTheWeb here is the homepage through the usual Google cache.

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.

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 ;-).