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October 15, 2003
AllTheWeb and AltaVista Merging: What It Means To You
Back in February 2003, Overture announced its intentions to acquire both AltaVista and FAST, the Norwegian search company operating AllTheWeb.com. We're now seeing the merging of the two engines' technologies.
Last month (September 2003) AllTheWeb.com implemented a new submission page. Before submitting, a person must now read a graphical submission code from the screen and then enter it into the box provided. The technology is identical to what AltaVista has utilized on its submission page for years to deter automated submissions. You can see the new page at:
I believe this is a strong indication that the two indexes maintained on AltaVista and AllTheWeb will be merging into a single index in the not so distant future. Although you could still submit to both engines to cover your bases, at some point a single submission may be all that is needed. Just as effective as direct submission, if not more so, is establishing third party links to your site from domains already in the index. As you may have learned, the major engines are becoming better and better at finding new sites by simply traveling the links already in their database.
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