Back in December, an image from a Yahoo in-company slideshow warned us that several major sites would be “sunset,” including popular community sites like delicious and search sites like AlltheWeb and Alta Vista. For AlltheWeb the news was made official in March, when a message appeared on the site indicating that the site’s final day would be April 4th. That date is now past, and anyone attempting to reach alltheweb.com will now be redirected to Yahoo search instead.
AlltheWeb opened its doors in 1999 and reached its height in popularity and size in 2003, when the total number of indexed pages rivaled Google, the leader of the time in that category. AlltheWeb was also the first group to develop instantly populating search results, a technology that has become the new standard, with the Google Instant official release and beta versions of both Bing and Yahoo using similar technology.
The closure of AlltheWeb was certainly upsetting to some of its 115,000 unique monthly visitors. However, considering the 78 million unique visitors to Yahoo each month, it should be evident that Yahoo isn’t losing much as a company. The business decision for Yahoo is moving along in accordance with its revised gameplan, which focuses on pulling back its search front (in fact, the search results are even being run by former competitor Bing) and less profitable products so it can focus on community, entertainment, and other niche features.
[via Search Engine Watch]
