Search engines that are no longer with us

    AltaVista , the most popular search engine in the mid-90s, ended up being sold by Overture. And this is not the only example of how the largest search sites cease to exist. Those who survived also have a hard time.

    Well-known search engine market expert Danny Sullivan summarizes the last decade in his article . He talks about search sites that have ceased to exist, as well as those that have changed the business model and are "born again."

    First up is the "death row group." In addition to AltaVista, this group includes five search engines.

    Open Text ( 1995-1997) This system provided a search on the Yahoo portal, as well as on its own site, quite popular. In the mid-90s, the owners decided to focus on developing search solutions for the business and were successful in this field. The search website closed in mid-1997 by

    Magellan ( 1995-2001 ). One of the first search engines on the Internet. Its popularity began to plummet after a purchase by Excite in mid-1996. The site was closed in April 2001.

    Infoseek ( 1995-2001) Having opened a search engine in early 1995, the creators of Infoseek originally planned to create a paid search service. When the attempt failed, the popular search engine began to earn like everyone else - on banner advertising. Disney Corporation bought a large stake in the company in 1998, after which it made a portal from Infoseek. It was renamed Go.com, but it never made a profit. In 2001, the development of its own search engine was discontinued, and now Go.com uses the services of a search provider Yahoo.

    Snap ( 1997-2001) Opened by CNET, this search engine first worked on the basis of Infoseek, then on the basis of Inktomi, and then opened its own catalog of manually assembled links with an original ranking algorithm that took into account the behavior of visitors (the number of clicks on each link). Later, the main share in the company was bought by NBC. Now the site presents results from various sources, and the search engine is testing a new interface in the style of Web 2.0.

    Direct Hit ( 1998-2002 ). This search site was born almost simultaneously with Google, and also had in its arsenal innovative technologies for automatically improving search results. The system was used as a search provider on the Lycos and MSN portals, then was purchased by Ask Jeeves in 2000. The website was formally closed in 2002.

    The list of disappeared search engines is supplemented by a list of those that have radically changed and continue to exist in a new guise.

    Lycos (1994; reborn in 1999). Together with WebCrawler, it was one of the first crawler-based search engines on the Internet. However, its own spider robot was stopped in 1999, in favor of search results from the AllTheWeb website.

    WebCrawler (1994; 2001). Instead of its own engine, WebCrawler now resorted to metasearch, getting results from several other sites. The project was launched in early 1994 as a research project at the University of Washington. It was bought by AOL in 1995, then resold by Excite in 1996, and its own robot stopped working in December 2001.

    Yahoo (1994; 2002). This portal appeared on the Internet much earlier than Google and AltaVista. Characteristically, it still retains the title of one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Until 2002, search results on the Yahoo portal provided links that were manually selected by editors. Only in October 2002, the company abandoned this system in favor of Google search results.

    Excite (1995; 2001). The site gained popularity almost immediately after its launch in 1995. The search engine worked with its own crawler. In 1996, the company bought two competitors: Magellan and WebCrawler, but could not bear the dot-com crisis. Own crawler was stopped in December 2001.

    HotBot(1996; 2002). Opened in May 1996 as part of the Wired holding, this site initially operated based on Inktomi search results, and in 1998 was acquired by Lycos along with other Wired assets. In December 2002, he began a “new life” as a metasearch engine.

    Ask Jeeves (1998; 2002). From the very beginning, this search site was different from the rest in that it had a huge staff of more than 100 editors who were engaged in improving search results. They analyzed what people search online and offered sites that best respond to user questions. Such a kind of "manual search." This approach has proven itself on popular topics, but was powerless with rare searches. Therefore, in early 2000, Ask Jeeves bought the Direct Hit search engine, but could not profit from it, so I also had to buy Teoma in 2001. As a result, the system was completely transferred to the Teoma engine in 2002.

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