All the Web is another search service owned by Yahoo, and it uses Yahoo's index. To answer the obvious user question of 'Why don't I just use Yahoo itself then?' it claims to have "some of the most advanced search features available". When you check the advanced search however, you find some pretty standard options, like phrase searching, Boolean searching, language selection, filters of various kinds, geographic searches and setting the date of the last page update. However, we did use these below to test their usefulness, since otherwise we would be replicating the review of the Yahoo! seqrch engine results.

1. Commercial product - digital cameras

A normal search for the phrase produced 88 million results. Since a user may well be interested in finding the latest digital camera models, we then used the udated results option to select only pages updated in the last week. This reduced the results to 18 million. Then we searched for only those pages updated today. This gave 673,000 results. Studying those, it became obvious the dates selected for the search give pages listing sites which were spidered on those dates, not sites which themselves have been updated.

2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name

We used the term Canon Powershot G7. We asked for the word 'review' to be included in the title, hoping to find authoritative commercial reviews. This search gave very useful results.

3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs

We limited the search to results from North America. The search produced a good selection of retail stores with useful, descriptive snippets.

4. Entertainment - Naomi Campbell

We decided we didn't want sites about her perfume, but did want pictures, so we constructed an advanced search accordingly. This produced an interesting set of results; but we noticed that the sponsored results were still for the model's perfume. Since for many searches the sponsored results offer just what we need, the inability to filter these is an annoying liablility.

5. Entertainment - games cheats

We wanted cheats for pc or xbox games, but not playstation cheats, the most common kind. One of the sponsored results offered advice about cheating on your parter - 'how to cheat'. Hmmm. The pure results were accurate, but seemed a bit old.

6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology

To add a twist, we searched for .pdf files only. This worked surprisingly well, although there were a lot of Berkeley graduate CVs in the listings.

7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel

Here we searched for results from Western Europe only, hoping to find local Dublin hotels. This worked very well indeed.

8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare

We added the name of an airline in the Advanced Search options, and it worked efficiently.

9. Research - asthma information

Here again we looked for .pdf files, hoping for reliable information created from printed sources. Though the usefulness of the snippets seemed to be degraded here, there was an impressive array of useful documents produced.

10. Research - Iraq maps

Here we we used the picture search option, and were presented with a good set of maps of various levels of details. Only one quibble - with images, there is no indication of the destination URL on the results page, so you are taking the clickthrough on trust.

11. Searching - Dogpile.com

Here we excluded dogpile.com itself from the search results, and added 'review' to the requirements. This gave us no useful results at all relating to a review of dogpile.com - a complete failure.

12. Searching - Ask Jeeves

We tried the same advanced search as #11, excluding ask.com, and got similar poor results. 'Ask.com' was not even recognised as a domain for the purposes of the search.

Summary:

If you want to take advantage of Yahoo's excellent search index, without all the clutter and distraction of using the Yahoo portal, AlltheWeb might be a good choice. If you need to use the advanced search features which they boast about it would be worth learning its tricks and being aware of its limitations.

Back to Dunbeacon Home Page

All the Web search engine - analysis and comments at dunbeacon.net