I was sad to see that Yahoo have announced that AlltheWeb will cease to exist from April 4th and queries will be redirected to Yahoo.

Of course it was inevitable given the fact that Yahoo itself is now powered by Bing (not quite yet in the UK but it’s not far away), and hardly anyone used AlltheWeb any more, but for those of us who’ve been around long enough to remember the old days it was a very nice search engine which I often found to produce better results than Google, Yahoo and MSN, and was very quick, had a simple interface and was generally a very pleasant system to use.

Personally I had hoped that Yahoo would adopt it completely and replace their own system but it seems the purchase was more about getting rid of a competitor and stopping the technology from being bought by anyone else. At a time when Google has a near monopoly and lots of people are hoping the Blekko provides some sort of challenge it’s tempting to recall days when there was more diversity and some real competition. If we had three or four genuinely popular search engines now who all used different algorithms then we’ve have a lot less link manipulation and the sort of dreadful content farms that Google is having to try to combat now.