
AllTheWeb closed by Yahoo early April, no-one notices (1999-2011) RIP - ck2
http://alltheweb.com
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MatthewPhillips
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2) I'm a nobody who couldn't possibly afford it or 3) the page is so outdated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.

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elbelcho
Yahoo! Where good things go to die!

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

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kevinburke
What is FTP Search?

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muyuu
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.

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ck2
For the "youngsters" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb>

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Aqwis
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.

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il
At least Altavista is still going strong.

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dpcan
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.

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

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bobds
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?

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

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bobds
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)?

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

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

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

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kno
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.

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parfe
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.

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

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

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shadowpwner
Yeah, just reminiscing about the past. ;)

