Could a Norwegian owned Web search utility unseat Google's stranglehold on the Web searching market?

Norwegian-owned Fast Search & Transfer (Fast) shot the moon when it named its search engine AlltheWeb. But judging by the numbers, this six-year-old tool lives up to its moniker. In June, AlltheWeb surpassed Google, the Lance Armstrong of search engines, in the race to index the Web. At the time of this writing, Fast had indexed 2,112,188,990 documents and counting--about 2,000,000 documents more than its rival. While AlltheWeb hasn't caught on yet--most Netizens still rate Google No. 1--this search engine dark horse is efficient and easy to use, and it deserves a look.

So fresh and so clean
Like many search engines, such as WiseNut and Teoma, AlltheWeb borrows Google's spartan look and feel. A search bar dominates the splash page, and there isn't a single ad in sight. Even Fast's advertising policy echoes Google's: the company clearly marks paid search listings at the very top of the search results page, so you can quickly separate the fluff from the good stuff.

But the similarities end there. An easy-to-use tabbed interface lets you quickly expand your search to include specific file types, such as video or MP3s, or document types (news stories, for example). Enter a keyword or a search phrase, and in addition to the standard laundry list of results, AlltheWeb tracks down related topics and displays them to the right in an area labeled Fast Topics. While the Fast Topics results occasionally shed light on your subject, especially when you know next to nothing about a search term, they proved erratic at best in our tests. For example, a search for Rudolph Valentino, a silent-film actor, generated useful links to search results of posters and collectibles, but when we typed in Heimlich maneuver, AlltheWeb included a link to old news stories about Dick Vitale, an ESPN sportscaster who choked on a piece of melon in July 2000. Related, yes; useful, no.

On a par with Google most of the time
Funky Fast Topics aside, AlltheWeb will please researchers who want to conduct specialized searches. In particular, AlltheWeb's real-time news search yields tons of pertinent documents, all time-stamped so that you know when they were last refreshed--a task at which Google has never excelled. Unveiled in March and still in beta, Google News Search covers only about 100 news sources, compared to Fast's 3,000. Fast also offers two speedy niche products: Scirus (Web site), which taps more than 105 million science-related pages to help you find the latest scientific headlines, and Megasoccer (Web site), an engine for rabid soccer fans.

Just like Google, Fast uses advanced algorithms to rank pages based on relevancy, and in our tests, AlltheWeb worked just as well as Google. A search for skin cancer, for example, yielded 642,116 results, compared to a mere 401,100 from Google. AlltheWeb's top 10 results were nearly identical to Google's, except that the first result took us to a shoddy page on alternative skin cancer treatment. Unfortunately, AlltheWeb's multimedia search results generally either missed the mark or served up outdated results. When we searched for Rio de Janeiro using the image search, AlltheWeb brought up 119 pics, and the first 9 were dead links. The same search on Google knocked our socks off; it generated 336 results, and most of the images were absolutely stunning.

Tweak, and ye shall find
Of course, there's no such thing as the perfect search. There are ways to tamper with Google, and the FTC is only now acting on complaints over paid search listings. In the end, though, the more search tools you use, the better. Dive into AlltheWeb but avoid the image search until Fast makes improvements.

Fast AlltheWeb
URL: alltheweb.com

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