Overview

FAST (aka. AllTheWeb) is the first major alternative to Google. Its index is almost the same size as Google's. FAST is also a university project like AltaVista and Google and was created at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

FAST has more than 70 employees and 20 associated scientists. It was established in July 1997 and became public on May 1998. It has a major partnership popular web portal Lycos. FAST, unlike many other search engines, is a product rather than a service. It is showcased on AllTheWeb.com.

Features

Like AltaVista, FAST lacks the 'Cached' feature. However, FAST has several other features.

• Offensive filter - This helps the results to remove all the 'offensive' words, particularly for children.
  
• Description - FAST extracts descriptions from the Open Directory Project and shows them beside each site in the results.
  
• Customizable features - AllTheWeb allows visitors to customize:
  
  • site clustering.
    
  • the design.
    
  • the search box.
    
  • the results per page.
    
  • where the results open (New window, same window).
    
  • highlighting of terms.
  
  
• Clustering - As well as site clustering, it also clusters the keywords into its related keywords showed at the bottom of the result page.
  
• Language limited - With FAST, visitors can also search engine pages and non-English pages.
  
• Other minor features - Other features include Query Language, URL Investigator, Query Spellchecking, Conversion Calculator and Query Prefixes.
  
• Searching differnet parts of the web - AllTheWeb allows a searcher to search through News, Pictures, Video, Audio and FTP files.