Apropos: Earlier today we were amused by a press release that claimed that AllTheWeb.com had overtaken Google in the size of their document index.
Soon after the release came out, the AllTheWeb.com site was down, perhaps too busy to handle the sudden burst of traffic and load.
In the afternoon, I had an opportunity to poke around. Remember the
FastSearch.com that provides the search for many of the blogs? It's the same
engine, and the 2.1
Billion web pages they claim to have indexed are really the 2.1 billion permalinks
(the name anchor) the bloggers so enthusiastically and automatically insert in
their blogs. So one page of Winer's Scripting News (who btw is hospitalized, I hear -- "Get well soon Dave") is consided as 100 documents by AllTheWeb 
While I welcome a new search engine, I am not blown away by AllTheWeb.
Further, they seem to provide deep links to images (unlike Google) in their ImageSearch
which prevents display of copyright notices, and is a sure invitation for
trouble. Publishers typically frown upon linking only to images.
