AllTheWeb closed by Yahoo early April, no-one notices (1999-2011) RIP | Hacker News Reader

AllTheWeb closed by Yahoo early April, no-one notices (1999-2011) RIP

alltheweb.com

36 pointsck232 comments

A few years ago I emailed Hotbot (owned by Lycos, owned by someone or other) about buying the domain, just out of curiosity of what they would want for it. They never responded. I'm not sure if it's because 1) they don't want to sell, 2) I'm a nobody who couldn't possibly afford it or 3) the page is so outdated the email address I tried is dead.

There are many of these old web properties that are long since dead, but could still be of some value to a startup. It's too bad they were all purchased by companies who don't see that value.

Yahoo! Where good things go to die!

Yahoo made it pointless when it removed FTP search, which was basically the point of that site when it started.

What is FTP Search?

Back in the day, anonymous FTP were a sizable part of the web (especially for good quality source code and scientific data/papers/comment). Some of them stored full backups of the lion's share of USEnet (and still do to this day).

FTPsearch filled a large void, and was blazingly fast compared to other search engines. In these days you waited for 15-20 seconds before the likes of Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista started showing results. Without tabbed browsing, to boot.

For the "youngsters" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb

I had all but forgotten that AlltheWeb (and by extension Fast) had its origins at my university. It's unfortunate that it was not more successful. Norway needs more innovative web technology companies; when Fast will completely cease to exist in a few years (it was acquired by Microsoft 3 or so years ago), Opera will be the only notable web technology company remaining.

At least Altavista is still going strong.

About once a year I go to AltaVista.com and Lycos.com to see if they still exist. I wonder sometimes if people go to work everyday at these companies, or if they're just a server somewhere now.

I miss when AltaVista was at altavista.digital.com.

Not only do people still work at these companies but you could be one of them: http://info.lycos.com/jobs.php

In the "SEO Analyst" requirements:

> Understanding of link building and content syndication are required > Bachelors degree in a related field

Did universities start selling SEO(-related) degrees already?

Related is probably marketing, business, or something CS-y.

I was mostly joking, since their formatting made it look like those two were the same bullet point.

My question still stands though, has anyone heard of a SEO degree, or some kind of online marketing degree (maybe with a SEO class on the curriculum)?

This one is endorsed by seomoz: http://www.marketmotive.com/

The fact that there is no engineering position on that list says enough.

How about that! If they are hiring, they must have a plan, a vision, a dream for the company. The question is, what is it? What can they do to get our attention again?

It will be pretty depressing working for any of these companies.

I'd like to throw excite.com onto my list.

Their TV Listings page is one of the easiest to use and best I've ever seen - merely for its simplicity and amount of information with all the shows:

http://www.excite.com/tv/data.jsp

Not quite that strong: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/altavista.com/

I think 400,000 uniques is amazing for a site that's nothing more than a skin on Yahoo search.

Which is now nothing more than a skin on Bing search ;)

So Google indirectly powers AltaVista? Crazy!

That's their legacy, however the trend suggests they're losing half of their visitors every 10 months.

AltaVista is owned by Yahoo. No engineering or product personnel were allocated to it when I was at Y!, it's essentially on maintenance mode.

Alltheweb, the internets fine source of pornvideos. Once upon a time.

Rest in peace ftpsearch.ntnu.no, you were the best way to find all the fresh warez pubs in the 90s.

I think Google ultra domination of search have been a minus for search innovation, most of new search service are forced to die in their infancy, no time to put on a fight. Real competition for Google will profit the Internet and us users.

DuckDuckGo has done some good in improve the visibility of the non-search issues related to search. I especially like the focus on privacy as well as the !bang syntax (Try !django us phone field). Plus a simple add-on is all it takes to change your default search provider.

I think innovation on "search" itself has matured enough where you aren't going to see a radical improvement in results. Google become the market leader thanks to crushing competition on quality of results, but that was a decade ago. At this point there isn't enough room to differentiate in the field on results alone, but I don't think that is a symptom of Google's dominance.

Take a look at Bing's flight results. Useful in that I care about prices and dates, not which site I buy a ticket through. Almost Wolfram Alpha style applets inferred from the search terms.

AskJeeves and Dogpile are still going strong. I could have sworn Dogpile didn't look so spammy before..

We're just Ask.com now and are the 40th ranked site on the Internet according to April Alexa estimates.

Yeah, just reminiscing about the past. ;)

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