Well it’s actually never been away but since it was taken over by Yahoo it’s certainly been a bit quiet. I always had a soft spot for it as it seemed to produce good quality relevant search results even when Google didn’t.

Now however it has a new version with an interesting feature – AlltheWeb Livesearch. As you type into the search box it produces a drop down list of alternatives which updates continuously, and it puts up the search results for the nearest search to what you’ve typed so far as you go. Seems pretty fast too; which was another feature I appreciated in the past – unlike Yahoo which sometimes seems to take ages while waiting for sponsored results to load.
Might make for some interesting experiments. I’ll be going back to it more often from now on and comparing the results to Google.