All the Web (FAST): A brief history of the Alltheweb search engine

All the Web was an unusual player in the search market. Developed by the FAST company, it was little known by many web searchers, but provided one of the largest indexes on the web and offered an array of search features and a reputation for generating accurate results from searches, second only to Google.

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) was founded in 1997 as a result of academic research and development from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Its search technology was fully launched in 1999 and rapidly established itself as a major contender in the search industry, supplying search technology to many international corporations as well as providing the main results for the Lycos network and for its own search tool, All The Web, which acts as the showcase of the search technology available.

During 2002 FAST added a suite of new search options, including searches for news, images, FTP and multimedia files such as videos and MP3. Although highly regarded as a search tool, FAST failed to market itself in the global search market to compete with the dominance of Google.

In February 2003 the FAST search engine was acquired by Overture for $100m, only 2 weeks after it also snapped up AltaVista for $140m. When Overture was then acquired by Yahoo! shortly afterwards, the search technology was incorporated into the new Yahoo! search engine and today Alltheweb is simply a satellite of Yahoo!, displaying the same search results.

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