Fast/AllTheWeb
AllTheWeb was bought & devoured by Yahoo, it no longer exists as a standalone search engine. The information in this article is being kept up for historical purposes only. No claim to current accuracy is made.
Alltheweb is a search engine run by a Norwegian company called "Fast Search & Transfer ASA" which was founded in 1997 and had their first commercial launch of products in 1999. The company provides enterprise search technology and uses the Alltheweb search engine as a showcase of their abilities.
Alltheweb's spider is known as the "FAST Web Crawler" and it usually spiders on a bi-monthly basis. For ranking purposes Fast does not greatly differ from Google or AltaVista, although it places less importance on link popularity. The same basic principles used to rank high on AltaVista and Google will help you with Fast, only with Fast on page factors such as your keywords and their arrangement will have a greater influence than off page factors such as link popularity and the context of your incoming links. Link popularity is still important with Fast, it's just not as important as with Google.
Alltheweb now powers Lycos, which was one of the original crawler based search engines. They have also partnered with Lycos to create a paid submission program, if you want guaranteed indexing and an increased indexing frequency. The pay program is not really necessary however as it is fairly easy to get listed without paying, especially if you've got a decent amount of incoming links and are listing in directories like Yahoo or DMOZ.
Alltheweb recently became the first search engine with the ability to index the content of flash animations. Previously the only way search engines could list flash (or movies or images for that matter) was by using off-page factors such as link popularity and link context. However specially created flash can now be indexed by Alltheweb, if you went through the necessary steps when compiling your animation.
Overture recently purchased both AltaVista and AllTheWeb, what will happen to these two search engines we don't yet know.
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