AlltheWeb Updates Its Search Technology

AlltheWeb has introduced several little tweaks and twackas in its ongoing quest to make Google look over its shoulder. First of all, AlltheWeb now automatically determines the visitor's country of origin and presents page results in their local language and English. So if someone was coming from Germany, AlltheWeb would present result pages in German and English. This is not unchangeable, however; you can change the language preferences from the "Customized Preferences" setting.

AlltheWeb also supports Boolean now, so you can use AND, OR, and ANDNOT in your searches. Be sure to have the search specification menu (it's the pulldown menu next to the query box on the advanced search page) set on "boolean expression" or it won't work. The two word search snowblower cerebrospinal will get you a single result done the usual way, but if you search for snowblower OR cerebrospinal you'll get lots of results. There's also a Boolean expression you might not have heard of: RANK. Using RANK gives preferences to search results that contain given keywords. For example, the search gardenias RANK wisteria will find pages containing the word gardenias,but will rank higher those pages which also contain the word wisteria.

Finally, AlltheWeb now offers a whole slew of browser tools, and they're not restricted to IE either. At http://www.alltheweb.com/help/tools/ you'll find tools to integrate AtW with Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, IE and Mac's Sherlock. Coooool.

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