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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 346 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Zapytaj Onet 📖 2006 - 2026 poland's largest question and answer site took its last question on 21 september 2026 and switched off nine days later. zapytaj had been running since august 2006, and it closed holding 22.7 million questions against 304 million answers from 4.1 million accounts. ringier axel springer said the habit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Halalgoogling 📖 2013 - 2026 on 9 july 2013 a search engine launched that did not index anything. it passed queries to google and bing, ran the answers through a filter for content it judged haram, and handed back what was left. the press cycle lasted a week and the site then sat there for thirteen years, serving a front page t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Ask Jeeves 📖 1996 - 2026 the search engine that let you type a question in plain english and pretended to understand. the mascot was a butler called jeeves. he had a top hat. you asked him things. he answered, badly, until 2006 when ask retired the butler. the search engine quietly gave up on its own crawler in 2010 and out |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Mullvad Leta 📖 2023 - 2025 on 6 november 2025 mullvad gave its search proxy three weeks to live. leta had spent most of its two and a half years behind a paid vpn account, passing queries to google through a shared cache so that no search could be traced back to the person who typed it. it opened up to everyone in march 2025 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
goo 📖 1997 - 2025 at one in the afternoon on 25 november 2025, ntt turned off a portal that had been running since 1997. goo started as a japanese-language crawler a year before google existed, grew a whole family of services under one brand, and then spent its last decade serving search results out of google's index |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
TCM Movie Database 📖 2006 - 2025 the american film institute licensed its catalog of feature films to turner classic movies in 2006, and tcm wrapped it in a free public database that grew past 130,000 titles and 1.25 million names. for nineteen years it was where you went to settle an argument about a character actor's filmography. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
AOL Shield Pro 📖 2017 - 2025 aol shield pro was a chromium-based windows web browser that aol sold on a subscription for about $3.99 a month with a 30-day free trial. it launched around late 2017 as a paid successor to the earlier free aol shield browser, aimed at users who wanted a chrome-compatible browser with layered securi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
ALIWEB 📖 1993 - 2025 martijn koster announced aliweb on 30 november 1993 from nexor in nottingham, which makes it the first search engine anyone built for the web. it did not crawl. site owners wrote a small index file describing their own pages and registered where it lived, and aliweb fetched those files on a schedule |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
My Yahoo! 📖 1996 - 2024 my yahoo was yahoo's customizable portal homepage, launched july 15 1996 as a per-user version of the main yahoo directory. you picked modules from a catalog (stock quotes, weather, sports scores, your email preview), arranged them on a grid, set a color theme. by 2005 yahoo had layered RSS aggregat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
FreshEYE 📖 1998 - 2024 the farewell page is still sitting at fresheye.com and it thanks users for twenty six years. toshiba started the search engine on 30 june 1998 with a pitch nobody else was making, that it could find pages updated within the last hour, and spun it out as a company that december with toppan and dentsu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Exalead 📖 2000 - 2024 francois bourdoncle helped build the part of altavista that let you narrow a query, then spent the next decade building a french search engine that did the same trick better. exalead crawled about eight billion pages on its own hardware and put thumbnails and file-type filters in front of you years |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Cache 📖 1997 - 2024 google cache shipped with the search engine itself in 1997. every result on the search page had a cached link beside it that took you to a stored copy of that page as google had last crawled it. the cache: search operator let you jump straight to the cached version of any url. for two and a half dec |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Pathfinder.gr 📖 1998 - 2024 the first greek web portal, online from october 1998, built by phaistos networks out of mires in crete. it had the full kit of the period, its own search engine over greek pages, its own mail at pathfinder.gr, and a whole community layer underneath. in april 2018 it closed all of that in one go and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Dalilmasr 📖 2010 - 2024 an egyptian domain registered on 4 february 2010, after two earlier attempts at the same idea had been abandoned on it. dalil masr listed egyptian businesses for free, about twelve thousand of them by 2022, in arabic with four other languages bolted across the top. the listings were still being serv |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Internet Explorer Mobile 📖 1996 - 2023 microsoft put a browser on windows ce in november 1996, wrote it from scratch because nothing in the desktop internet explorer would fit in the memory a palmtop had, and then spent twenty seven years dragging it forward. it was the default on every pocket pc and every windows mobile handset, where i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Petal Search 📖 2020 - 2023 washington cut huawei off from google mobile services in 2019 and the phones still had to ship, so huawei wrote its own search. petal search reached 170 countries and 55 languages, won a design award, and never really stopped leaning on microsoft's index underneath. the web version went dark on 25 j |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Neeva 📖 2019 - 2023 neeva was a paid, ad-free, privacy-first search engine built by two ex-google ads executives. it launched to the us public in june 2021 for $4.95 a month, added generative-ai answers in january 2023, then announced the consumer shutdown on 20 may 2023. snowflake acquired the company two weeks later |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
RootsWeb WorldConnect 📖 1999 - 2023 on 10 november 1999 rootsweb announced a free place to put your family tree, after a four-week test in which its own staff and users pushed 5.5 million records into it. twenty-three years later it held more than 465 million names and anyone could read every one of them without an account. ancestry h |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gigablast 📖 2002 - 2023 matt wells left infoseek, went home to albuquerque and spent two decades building a search engine that crawled the web itself rather than reselling somebody else's results. it opened to the public on 21 july 2002, claimed better than twelve billion pages by 2015, and quietly supplied the index behin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Arabul 📖 1998 - 2023 arabul opened in 1998 as a turkish search box bolted onto a hand-sorted category tree, and for a few years it tried to be a portal, with chat rooms and a shopping search and a page for the national exam results. the portal parts fell off one by one. from 2008 the front page stopped changing, and the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Inverse Symbolic Calculator 📖 1995 - 2023 burnaby, british columbia, 18 july 1995: a university research group put a table of fifty four million constants on the web and let anyone paste in a decimal to find out what it was. the service moved to australia in 2010, answered its last query from a university host in early 2023, and now survive |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Beaker 📖 2017 - 2022 a browser that could also make websites. you hit new site, wrote html in a built-in editor, and it was live, served off your own machine and seeded by whoever visited it. no account and no host anywhere. paul frazee and tara vancil built it at blue link labs on the dat protocol from 2017. the demo l |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Cake Browser 📖 2018 - 2022 the pitch was that a page of blue links is just another menu you have to read, so this browser preloaded the top search results as real pages and let you swipe sideways through them. cake technologies built it in provo, utah, and raised five million dollars for it in 2018. sometime in 2022 the whole |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Qwant Music 📖 2016 - 2022 ajaccio, corsica, had a search-engine subsidiary for about three years. it built a music search that could find a record by tempo or by chord, using analysis work from ircam, and hung it off a french privacy-first engine that was trying to be the european answer to google. in november 2022 new bosse |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Mighty 📖 2019 - 2022 suhail doshi had already built mixpanel when he decided the problem with chrome was the machine it ran on. mighty put a chromium window on a sixteen-core cloud server and sent the pixels back to your laptop for thirty-five dollars a month. it worked. it just never worked enough times faster than the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Yaani 📖 2017 - 2022 turkcell put it up in october 2017 as turkey's own search engine, announced with the line that it was not turkcell's engine but the country's. the promise was a machine that understood turkish grammar and kept turkish data in a turkish data center. what it did not have was an index of its own, and t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Torch Browser 📖 2012 - 2022 torch was chrome's engine wearing a download manager as a coat. it folded torrents and video-grabbing straight into the browser, spread through bundling and free-download sites, and hit ten million users. then the updates stopped in 2020 and the downloads vanished in 2022. what is left is a browser |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Philippines 📖 2006 - 2022 yahoo opened a philippine edition in 2006 and it became something the american parent never managed at home, which is a portal an entire country genuinely defaulted to. the local editorial team was dissolved in february 2015 and the home page was redirected to yahoo singapore that june. it came back |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Parsijoo 📖 2010 - 2022 600,000 hits a day in 2016 made parsijoo the second most used search engine in iran, behind google by a margin nobody at the telecommunication ministry wanted to say out loud. it indexed persian pages, and it indexed the state's sensitivities along with them: a search for mir hossein mousavi returne |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Internet Explorer 📖 1995 - 2022 the browser that came with windows. it killed netscape. it ran the web for about ten years. then it became the universally hated browser web developers had to test in. by IE6 it was a punchline. microsoft replaced it with edge in 2015 and finally turned it off on 15 june 2022. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Meta.org 📖 2010 - 2022 on 28 october 2021, the day facebook announced it was becoming meta, the chan zuckerberg initiative put a banner on meta.org saying the site would sunset on 31 march 2022. underneath that banner was a biomedical discovery engine built in toronto by the siblings sam and amy molyneux under the name sc |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Firefox Reality 📖 2018 - 2022 mozilla's web browser for virtual reality headsets. it launched september 18 2018 for oculus go and viveport, later added quest and pico. the pitch was that webxr deserved a browser shaped for it. it ran four years, never got a meaningful install base, and was retired on february 3 2022. igalia took |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Kataweb 📖 1999 - 2022 an italian newspaper group built a portal in 1999 and a bank paid the equivalent of 157 million euros for five percent of it, which put the whole company near three billion. the stock market listing never happened because the bubble went first. what survived was the useful part, free dial-up access |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Spray.se 📖 1995 - 2022 spray was sweden's great dot-com portal, a web company that at the top of the boom was worth around four billion dollars on paper. it ran the spray.se portal and free webmail under the tagline that here begins the internet. lycos europe bought it in 2000, then passed it down through a chain of owner |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Picsearch 📖 2000 - 2022 picsearch was an image search engine built by two students in linköping that almost nobody used directly, because it was sold to the portals instead. lycos ran on it. so did web.de and maktoob, and yandex for a period, and mynet in turkey. at its widest it held over three billion images and it staye |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Academic 📖 2016 - 2021 microsoft academic was microsoft research's third attempt at searching the scientific literature, launched in february 2016 on top of a machine-extracted graph of papers, authors and institutions. it indexed over 260 million publications and gave the whole dataset away under an open license, which i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
SalamWeb 📖 2019 - 2021 fifteen million dollars went into a chromium fork that tried to make the web safe for muslim families, with a three layer content filter and prayer times in the toolbar. it launched out of kuala lumpur in january 2019 carrying a shariah compliance certificate and eight languages. by december 2021 th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
TenFourFox 📖 2010 - 2021 cameron kaiser maintained a fork of firefox for power mac hardware apple had already abandoned, alone and in his evenings, from late 2010 until october 2021. tenfourfox was the only browser on powerpc mac os x with a javascript jit and the first one there to speak tls 1.3, which meant a 2005 g5 coul |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Firefox Lite 📖 2017 - 2021 mozilla built a browser for people who counted megabytes, shipped it to indonesia first, and made it out of android's built-in webview because gecko was too heavy to carry. so the organization that exists to keep a second rendering engine alive shipped a browser that did not contain one. it worked, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Yooz 📖 2015 - 2021 iran wanted a search engine that sanctions could not reach, and paid at least seven billion tomans for one. yooz went up in february 2015 claiming a billion indexed pages, then spent six years serving a fraction of that to a country that kept typing google.com anyway. the last working capture is 15 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Firefox for Fire TV 📖 2017 - 2021 amazon and google spent the end of 2017 refusing to carry each other's products, and when google pulled the youtube app off fire tv, amazon's answer was to point its own customers at a browser. mozilla shipped firefox for fire tv on 20 december 2017 and for about eighteen months it was how a lot of |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Yippy 📖 2004 - 2021 yippy was the metasearch engine that grouped its results into named folders on the left rail. it started life as clusty in october 2004, built by vivisimo out of a carnegie mellon research spin-off in pittsburgh. clustering was the pitch, instead of a flat list you got a tree of topic buckets. yippy |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Classilla 📖 2009 - 2021 cameron kaiser maintained a web browser for an operating system apple had walked away from. classilla was mozilla 1.3.1 kept walking, released in 2009 and patched by one man against a web that added tls versions and javascript faster than any single person could follow. the last official build came |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Pipilika 📖 2013 - 2021 pipilika launched on 13 april 2013 as the first search engine bangladesh had built for itself, written by computer science students at shahjalal university of science and technology with muhammad zafar iqbal supervising. it crawled the national newspapers in bangla and the bangla blogs, and it answe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
uBlock Origin Extra 📖 2016 - 2020 akamai bought certain assets of instart logic in february 2020 for $36.4 million, and by the autumn the request-disguising technology raymond hill had written a whole extension to defeat had, in his words, appeared to go away. he unpublished the extension on 20 october 2020 and screenshotted the chr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Sputnik (Rostelecom) 📖 2014 - 2020 rostelecom unveiled sputnik on 22 may 2014 at the st petersburg economic forum, a search engine paid for by the state and pitched as the safe place to look things up. two million people tried it in the first week. by august the monthly number was down to sixteen thousand six hundred, and by the summ |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Flashblock 📖 2004 - 2020 593,876 firefox users had flashblock installed in january 2016, and 424,955 of them were left by the middle of 2017. philip chee had maintained it since january 2004, with parallel builds for seamonkey, for one purpose: stop flash from playing until the person at the keyboard asks for it. mozilla sp |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Cliqz 📖 2015 - 2020 a firefox fork plus its own search engine, built and bankrolled by a german media conglomerate to compete with google in europe. it stayed european-coded the whole way, with most of its user base in germany and austria. the 2020 shutdown cited 95 percent google market share, no european political ba |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Adioso 📖 2008 - 2020 two australians spent twelve years trying to build a flight search that took a sentence instead of a form. you typed melbourne to europe late september for twenty to thirty days and adioso worked out what that meant, which is still not a thing most booking sites will let you do. tom howard and fenn |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Pricesearcher 📖 2016 - 2020 one point one billion products from more than two and a half thousand retailers, indexed by a crawler built for the job, and not one penny charged to list any of it. pricesearcher spent four public years assembling the largest product index in britain and never settled on a way to bill for it. the c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Edge Legacy 📖 2015 - 2020 edge legacy was the browser microsoft built to escape internet explorer. it shipped with windows 10 in july 2015 on a new engine called edgeHTML and a new javascript runtime called chakra. four and a half years later microsoft replaced the entire engine with chromium and called the result "the new m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Correlate 📖 2011 - 2019 google trends tells you what a search term did over time. correlate did the same arithmetic pointing the other way, so you uploaded a data series and it handed back the queries whose search volume moved in the same shape. it came out of google labs on 25 may 2011, from the same line of work that pro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Kuniao Browser 📖 2019 - 2019 for a few days in november 2019 there was an advertised, legal way to read twitter from inside china. kuniao was a windows browser from a fuzhou company that pushed traffic through tencent cloud servers in hong kong, and it sold itself as approved rather than hidden. what it delivered was a second f |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
FedBizOpps 📖 1998 - 2019 every american federal contracting opportunity above $25,000 had to appear on one website first, and from october 2001 to november 2019 that website was fbo.gov. it started as a nasa side project, took over from a printed daily newspaper, and ended as a redirect when the general services administrat |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Safari Extensions Gallery 📖 2010 - 2019 apple opened the gallery on 28 july 2010 alongside safari 5.0.1 with about a hundred curated extensions in it, and for nine years it was the only sanctioned place to get one. the developer email said it would be gone in september 2019. the internet archive says otherwise: a full working page with th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Baidu Browser 📖 2011 - 2019 baidu shipped a desktop browser in july 2011 that ran two rendering engines at once, webkit for the modern web and trident for the chinese banking sites that still demanded internet explorer. in february 2016 citizen lab found it sending search terms and location data to baidu servers in the clear. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
POPLINE 📖 1973 - 2019 popline was the reproductive health literature database, more than 370,000 records reaching back to 1827, run out of johns hopkins on usaid money from 1978 onward. in february 2008 its search engine was configured to treat abortion as a stop word, so a database built for family planning research cou |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
kizasi 📖 2005 - 2019 the slogan was: from blogs, know the topic, find the sign. kizasi.jp read about 250,000 japanese blog entries every day and ran a time-series co-occurrence analysis over them to work out which words were rising and what they were rising next to. yahoo japan invested and wired it into a product calle |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
In.com 📖 2008 - 2019 mumbai, august 2008: web18 put an entire portal behind a two-letter domain, and by the september comscore numbers in.com was the second most visited site in india, ahead of indiatimes and sify. it did not hold. alexa had it eighteenth in india by december 2012, and the email service closed on 4 marc |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Dragonfly 📖 2017 - 2019 google spent two years building an android search app for china that would quietly remove results about human rights and peaceful protest, tie every query to a phone number, and tell the user nothing had been removed. a few hundred of eighty-eight thousand employees knew. the intercept published the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Kylo 📖 2010 - 2019 a browser for the couch, with buttons sized to be read from across a room and a $99 pointing mouse sold beside it. kylo shipped on 19 march 2010 and hulu blocked it on the 22nd, which set the tone for everything that followed: the living room was where rights holders cared most about which window th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Proximus Skynet 📖 1995 - 2019 belgacom started an internet arm in 1995 and named it after the machine that starts the war in the terminator films, and nobody inside the company stopped them. skynet.be spent the next twenty years as one of the most visited addresses in belgium, largely because every belgacom subscriber was handed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
reegle 📖 2006 - 2019 vienna ran a search engine for clean energy for thirteen years and then replaced it with a frameset. reegle indexed the renewable energy and efficiency material that the general web buried under press releases, and gave every country a profile page you reached by clicking a map. european government |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Comodo IceDragon 📖 2012 - 2019 comodo shipped a firefox fork for seven years and then simply stopped. version 65.0.2.15 went up on the company forum in june 2019 and nothing followed it, no notice and no farewell thread. the board was quietly moved into "discontinued products" two and a half years later, and the product page star |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Facebook Graph Search 📖 2013 - 2019 facebook announced graph search on 15 january 2013 and called it a third pillar of the site. you typed a sentence at it, photos of my friends taken in london, and it answered off the social graph instead of matching keywords. it only ever spoke us english. the privacy problem showed up inside a week |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Opera Turbo 📖 2009 - 2019 https killed it, quietly and without a notice. opera turbo sent your page requests through opera's own servers, which fetched everything, recompressed the images hard and shipped back something up to eighty percent smaller, and for about a decade that was the single best thing you could do to a bad |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Voilà 📖 1998 - 2018 the french web portal and search engine that was the default homepage for a generation of french users in the late 1990s and early 2000s. owned by France Telecom, eaten by google, and quietly turned off in 2018. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Findx 📖 2016 - 2018 in november 2018 a small Danish company gave up on the hardest and most expensive part of search, which is having an index of your own. findx had crawled the web itself rather than renting results from microsoft, and for that it got blocked by sites like yelp and linkedin, then had its machines flag |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Conkeror 📖 2004 - 2018 shawn betts had already written a window manager with no mouse in it. conkeror was the same idea pointed at the web: emacs key bindings, plus numbered labels over every link so you could follow one by typing a digit. it ran on xulrunner, the mozilla application platform, and when mozilla let the las |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Redcore 📖 2018 - 2018 on 15 august 2018 redcore announced a series c of 250 million yuan and described itself as the first fully homegrown chinese browser, engine included. on 16 august a developer on weibo unpacked the installer and found chrome's own files and icons sitting inside it. the download links came off the we |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Dartium 📖 2012 - 2018 "this version of dartium has expired" is the last thing most people ever saw from it. dartium was a chromium build with google's dart vm wired in, so a developer could load dart source straight into a browser instead of compiling it to javascript on every save. the chrome team declined to take the v |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
search.cpan.org 📖 1999 - 2018 graham barr wrote it in early 1999, on a solaris machine at washington university in st. louis, and it answered for nineteen years. by the end most of the site was running 2005-era perl and the people hosting it said out loud that maintenance had become a burden. on 25 june 2018 they threw a switch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Google Site Search 📖 2008 - 2018 for ten years, if a company's website had a search box that actually returned the right page, there was a fair chance google was being paid to run it. site search launched on 2 june 2008 as the paid tier of custom search: the same hosted index with the ads taken out, sold by how many queries you exp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Alluc 📖 2005 - 2018 alluc held no files. it indexed other people's streaming links, roughly a hundred million of them across more than seven hundred video hosts, and answered the one question the pre-netflix decade kept asking: where is this playing right now. the movie industry called it a blatant pirate site and aust |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Uzbl 📖 2009 - 2018 gentoo buried it in january 2016 with a mask message saying the project was slowly dying and nothing was happening in the repository. the maintainer agreed, having filed the request himself. then uzbl shipped two more releases anyway, the second on 27 october 2016, and the final commit landed on 5 j |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Esmas.com 📖 2000 - 2017 esmas was televisa's portal play for the spanish-language web. it launched in 2000 as a one-roof aggregator for shopping, classifieds, dating, horoscopes, chatrooms, celebrity fanclubs, webmail and bulletin boards, all tied to the network's tv brands. esmas movil followed in 2004 as a mobile enterta |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Grams 📖 2014 - 2017 grams appeared in april 2014 and indexed the tor drug markets the way a search engine indexes anything else, down to an ad system and a logo drawn in google's colors. the search was the famous part, but the revenue was a bitcoin tumbler called helix that took a fee to break the link between a wallet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Nana10 📖 1999 - 2017 gadi shamshon and zev alon started nana in 1999 inside an israeli isp's offices in haifa, and for most of two decades it was one of the places the hebrew internet went to argue. channel 10 bought half of it in 2007 for about 22.5 million dollars and stapled its own number onto the name. on 11 decemb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Vimperator 📖 2007 - 2017 vimperator turned firefox into a modal editor. the toolbars went away and a command line took their place at the bottom of the window, where you typed what you wanted the browser to do. martin stubenschrott started it in 2007 and the last release came out on 1 february 2017. firefox 57 shipped on 14 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Firefox Legacy Add-ons 📖 2004 - 2017 firefox 57 shipped on 14 november 2017. it was the fastest firefox in years, and it was also the release that broke every extension written against xul. the old system had let an add-on reach into the browser's own interface and change anything it found there, which is why a firefox in 2008 could be |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Lucifox 📖 2011 - 2017 a swedish developer working as ordbrand built an e-book reader that lived inside a firefox tab and named the whole family of it after a seventeenth century poet. it was free under the gpl and it opened epub without drm, one book per browser tab. on 14 november 2017 firefox 57 removed the extension s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Fasterfox 📖 2005 - 2017 the settings window had five presets and the last one was called extreme, with help text admitting it went past what the specifications asked for and raised the load on the server. eleven million downloads later, webmasters were publishing apache rules to block it by name. tony gentilcore stopped ma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Xaphir 📖 2017 - 2017 xilopix spent eight years in épinal building a search engine that refused to rank by popularity. xaphir went live on 9 may 2017 with 169 million pages indexed and a stated ambition of reaching the world top five by 2020. it would not accept a query written in anything but french, and it kept wikiped |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
碧海银沙网 📖 1996 - 2017 a directive from guangdong telecom on 13 september 2017 closed four of its regional portals at once, and 碧海银沙 was the oldest of them. it had been the front page of the internet in zhanjiang since 1996, and its chat rooms held fourteen million registered accounts at a time when most of china had neve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Nigma 📖 2005 - 2017 two students from the computational mathematics faculty at moscow state university launched nigma on 12 april 2005. it had no index of its own. it queried google, yandex and everyone else at once, clustered what came back by meaning, and then did the thing nobody else was doing: it answered math and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Opera Coast 📖 2013 - 2017 coast was opera answering a question none of the larger browser companies were asking, which was what a browser would look like if somebody had invented it for a touchscreen instead of adapting one. it launched for ipad on 9 september 2013 with no address bar and no back button, only gestures and a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Terra Networks 📖 1999 - 2017 telefónica spun terra up in 1999 as a dot-com play to be the aol of the spanish-speaking web. it went public near the top of the mania and got fully swallowed back into the parent telecom by 2005. by the middle of the 2010s it was a portal brand no one had a reason to open. on 30 june 2017 the spani |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Scrub The Web 📖 1996 - 2017 twenty one years of taking url submissions ended with a line on the front page saying the domain was for sale and the engine was not. scrub the web came out of a small arizona software company in 1996, crawled whatever webmasters handed it, and ranked the results on the words in the document instead |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
About.com 📖 1997 - 2017 about.com was the human-edited topic-guides site that got eaten by google panda and its own scale. for ten years it sat on top of the search results for any "how do i do x" query in english. then the algorithm hit. by 2017 it had been sold three times in a decade and dissolved into a brand called do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
DMOZ 📖 1998 - 2017 dmoz was the volunteer attempt to keep the human-edited directory alive after yahoo's directory turned commercial. tens of thousands of editors classified millions of sites into a hierarchy that anyone could download under a permissive license. it lasted nineteen years on aol life support before aol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
IceRocket 📖 2004 - 2017 icerocket launched in april 2004 as a search engine for blogs, in the window when the thing google was worst at was telling you what had been written in the last hour. blake rhodes built it and mark cuban put money and his own blog behind it. at its widest it crawled more than two hundred million bl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
The WWW Virtual Library 📖 1991 - 2017 geneva, 1991: tim berners-lee kept a page of links to every new web server somebody emailed him about. that page became the virtual library, the first index the web ever had, run by volunteer experts rather than by a company. a password change in 2005 locked the elected council out of vlib.org and t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Google Gesture Search 📖 2010 - 2017 you scrawled a letter on the screen with one finger and the phone pulled up the contact, app or track that matched, then you kept scrawling until the right thing was at the top. yang li's research project shipped on 3 march 2010 for the nexus one, got a developer api in 2011 and support for over for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Quixey 📖 2009 - 2017 around $130 million went into the proposition that apps needed their own search engine, and for a few years that was a serious question rather than a joke. quixey started in mountain view in 2009 and indexed what an app could do rather than what it was named, which is still the right way to search a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Xombrero 📖 2010 - 2017 a browser written by openbsd people for openbsd people, whose entire pitch was that firefox was too big to trust and this thing was two hundred kilobytes and would not run a line of javascript you had not approved. it shipped its last release in february 2015. two years later openbsd removed it from |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
blinkx 📖 2004 - 2017 blinkx launched in 2004 out of cambridge and san francisco, spun out of the search company autonomy by suranga chandratillake. its trick was searching video by what was said in it, running speech-to-text over millions of hours of clips so you could find the moment someone spoke a word. it listed in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
ChaCha 📖 2006 - 2016 chacha was a us-only sms search service from scott a. jones and brad bostic, launched september 1, 2006 in carmel, indiana. you texted a question to the short code 242-242 and a paid human guide texted back an answer. it raised about $58 million in venture money including from jeff bezos and peaked |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
HotBot 📖 1996 - 2016 hotbot launched in 1996 with the loudest design of any search engine on the web and a back-end called inktomi that updated its index weekly when its rivals updated monthly. for two years that was a real competitive edge. then google arrived with a different ranking model and the entire pre-google se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Toolbar 📖 2004 - 2016 a browser toolbar that mostly arrived on machines the same way spam arrives in inboxes: bundled inside something else, checkbox pre-checked, click next. it did its job. yahoo search was one click away and pop-ups got blocked, but nobody actually chose it. when the firefox rewrite gutted the customiz |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
THOMAS 📖 1995 - 2016 the library of congress switched thomas on on 5 january 1995, a day after the 104th congress convened, because congress had decided the public should be able to read legislation without paying a subscription service for it. for twenty-one years it was the address where you checked a bill's text and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
ninemsn 📖 1997 - 2016 in 1997 microsoft and kerry packer's pbl put fifty million dollars and their australian internet assets into one joint venture and named it ninemsn. for nineteen years it was where a large share of australia got its news and its hotmail, with a television network on one side of the name and a softwa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
MSN China 📖 2005 - 2016 msn china was half microsoft and half a shanghai state investment fund, and it was the only national msn permitted to keep its own newsroom and its own page design. it spent eleven years failing to catch sina or sohu, and then the phone emptied out the portal category underneath it. microsoft announ |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mystery Seeker 📖 2009 - 2016 type anything, press search, and you got somebody else's search instead. that was the entire mechanic, launched on 2 october 2009 under the name mystery google and renamed mystery seeker seven weeks later. users worked out that the broken part was the interesting part and started sending coordinated |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Slovari 📖 2005 - 2016 yandex spent a decade licensing the russian reference shelf and putting it behind one search box, the great soviet encyclopedia and dahl included, with most of the dictionary side written by abbyy's linguists. then the reading moved to phones and the contracts did not move with it, because they cove |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Wildcard 📖 2014 - 2016 ten million dollars from general catalyst and softbank bought a card-based iphone browser and a published card schema that publishers were invited to adopt. jordan cooper switched it off on 16 march 2016 with more than a year of capital still in the bank, on the grounds that the retention numbers wo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Zuula 📖 2006 - 2016 every other metasearch engine of the era mixed its sources into a single ranked list and asked you to trust the mixing. zuula would not do it. boris simkovich and tim hunt, running an llc out of new jersey, gave each source engine a tab of its own and let you drag the tabs into whatever order you wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
WDYL (What Do You Love) 📖 2011 - 2016 a search box with a heart on the button, and behind it a dozen google products answering the same query at the same time. wdyl.com went live on 27 june 2011 with no blog post and no briefing, which was how google shipped its odder experiments that year. type something rude into it and it refused, th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Crazy Browser 📖 2002 - 2016 15 january 2002 is the date on the first release and 20 september 2011 is the date on the last. in between, crazy browser wrapped microsoft's trident engine in a window that had tabs and a pop-up blocker that worked, years before internet explorer shipped either one. it was freeware from a developer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
iWon.com 📖 1999 - 2016 iwon was a portal with a slot machine glued to the front. every search, every page view, every login earned tickets toward a daily ten thousand dollar drawing, a weekly thousand dollar drawing, a monthly million, and one ten million dollar prize on tax day. cbs put seventy million of advertising beh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nokia Xpress 📖 2012 - 2015 ninety percent was the number nokia printed on the box. xpress browser did not fetch a web page to your phone, it fetched the page to a nokia server and sent down whatever survived the compression, which is how a series 40 handset with a two inch screen and a metered data plan could open a real webs |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Clix 📖 1999 - 2015 the portal half of a portuguese internet provider, opened in october 1999 on free dial-up where the only bill was the phone call. it came with a mailbox and ten megabytes of hosting, and by july 2001 it was the second most visited site in the country behind sapo. the provider underneath it was folde |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
NPAPI 📖 1995 - 2021 npapi was the netscape plugin api. it shipped in navigator 2.0 in 1995 as the way for plugins to load inside a browser and it stayed the plugin architecture for firefox chrome safari and opera for two decades. chrome shipped v45 without it in september 2015. firefox held on for flash until january 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
T-Online 📖 1995 - 2015 t-online was deutsche telekom's twenty-year attempt to own the german consumer internet from the dial-up up. at 2001 peak it was europe's biggest isp, ten point seven million subscribers, half of all german internet users. by 2015 telekom had run out of reasons to keep the portal and sold t-online.d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Streamus 📖 2014 - 2015 a twenty-five-year-old in california shipped a chrome extension in february 2014 that turned youtube into a music player with a queue, and three hundred thousand people installed it. youtube objected that it pulled the audio away from the video and left the ads behind. sixteen months of letters, one |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
BAM-Portal 📖 2006 - 2015 seventy million records sat behind one search box, and then they did not. bam-portal went online in 2006, built by a consortium of german state libraries and archives, and it was the first thing in the german-speaking web where a museum object and a library record could come back in the same result |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Adblock Edge 📖 2013 - 2015 824,411 firefox users had adblock edge installed in may 2015, and the listing they installed it from already carried a line saying the addon would be discontinued in june. adstomper had forked adblock plus in 2013 in order to delete exactly one feature, the acceptable ads whitelist that let advertis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
xinmsn 📖 2010 - 2015 mediacorp and microsoft merged their singapore web presence into one portal in march 2010 and gave it a name that was half mandarin and half american. for five years it was the country's news page and the place you went to watch the mediacorp drama you had missed. then the two owners decided they wo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Handbag.com 📖 1999 - 2015 handbag.com was a british high street chemist and a british newspaper group building a portal for british women, launched on 6 october 1999 with three million discs handed out over boots counters. it survived the dot-com bust, which almost nothing of its vintage did, and sold to the national magazin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Blekko 📖 2010 - 2015 blekko was the slashtag search engine that rich skrenta launched publicly on 1 november 2010, with the pitch of fixing google's spam problem by letting users filter to curated subsets of the web. you typed your query plus a slashtag like /news or /tech and the results came from a hand-vetted source |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Directory 📖 1994 - 2014 yahoo directory was the original yahoo. before it was a portal it was just two stanford students keeping a list of every interesting website they could find, sorted into categories. for ten years that list was the index of the web. by 2014 it had been a paid-inclusion afterthought for a decade and y |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BrowserChoice.eu 📖 2010 - 2014 the browser ballot was the european commission's remedy for microsoft bundling internet explorer with windows. from march 2010 any windows machine in the eea whose default browser was ie got a screen offering twelve browsers in random order, and the commission counted 795 million views against 165 m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Plasa.com 📖 1998 - 2014 telkom indonesia opened this portal in 1998 and ran it for sixteen years as the web half of the national phone company. free plasa.com mail addresses were the part people actually kept. in december 2014 an ebay joint venture renamed the whole thing blanja.com, ended the mail service and asked long-t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Technorati 📖 2002 - 2014 technorati was the search engine for blogs back when blogs were a discrete category of the web, separate from news sites and separate from social media. dave sifry launched it in november 2002. by 2006 it claimed to track twenty-seven million blogs and assign each one an authority score based on inb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Userscripts.org 📖 2005 - 2014 jesse andrews built the place greasemonkey scripts lived in, and in 2010 he posted that it had gone into maintenance mode and asked for somebody to take it over. nobody did. by late 2013 the popular-scripts list was facebook spam carrying identical ratings and zero installs, and on 6 may 2014 the si |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Skyfire 📖 2008 - 2014 skyfire was the 2008-2014 mobile browser that solved iphone-cant-play-flash by rendering flash on a proprietary server farm and streaming a video back to the phone. founded as dvc labs in mountain view by nitin bhandari and erik swenson, renamed skyfire 2008, won the webby people's voice for best mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Yellowikis 📖 2005 - 2014 a fifteen year old noticed that wikipedia kept deleting the small businesses she looked up, and told her father the entries needed somewhere else to live. yellowikis launched in january 2005 as a mediawiki phone book anybody could edit. yell limited, which had made 2.4 billion dollars the year befor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
123people 📖 2007 - 2014 123people opened in vienna on 1 july 2007 and did exactly one thing. you typed a person's name, it went out to more than two hundred sources at once, and it laid the photographs and the phone numbers it found onto a single page. by march 2010, when the french directory group solocal bought it, forty |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Jike 📖 2010 - 2014 jike opened in june 2010 as people's search, a search engine owned by the people's daily and handed to deng yaping, who had four olympic golds at table tennis and a doctorate from cambridge. it was renamed jike a year later and spent a reported two billion yuan trying to get chinese users to leave b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Volunia 📖 2012 - 2014 volunia was an italian search engine built in padua by massimo marchiori, whose 1997 work on hyper search sits in the citation trail behind pagerank. it opened as an invite beta on 6 february 2012 in twelve languages, promising a map of every site you could fly over and a layer where visitors on the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
vTap 📖 2007 - 2014 $28 million went into veveo before vtap shipped in september 2007, and what it bought was a video search engine that narrowed its results on every keypress, running on windows mobile handsets. mobile video barely existed yet, so the search engine arrived before the thing it searched. rovi paid about |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Mahalo 📖 2007 - 2014 mahalo's pitch was that humans could outperform google's algorithm at building search results. google disagreed within four years. jason calacanis ran the company from may 2007 to january 2014, mostly through the period when techcrunch was the room you wanted attention from. the panda update in febr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
hakia 📖 2004 - 2014 a turkish nuclear physicist and a finnish economist launched a semantic search engine out of new york in 2004. it wanted to answer questions using ontology and fuzzy logic, ten years before the transformer papers made that idea viable. it never dented google. it went quiet in 2014 and the domain got |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MetaCrawler 📖 1995 - 2014 metacrawler was the first search box that did not search anything itself. erik selberg built it as a grad-school project at the university of washington, wired it to ask the real engines all at once, and it worked well enough to sell twice and end up owned by paul allen's people. then google indexed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Ajeeb.com 📖 2000 - 2014 the web was in english and most of the arab world was not, so sakhr software pointed its machine-translation engine at the gap and opened a portal in november 2000 that would render an english page into arabic in under four seconds on a dial-up line. inside a year it was doing more than forty millio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Anime Web Turnpike 📖 1995 - 2014 dormant jay fubler harvey put the anime web turnpike online in august 1995 as a hub: a page of links to other people's anime and manga sites, sorted by category, with new submissions filed by hand. it grew past forty thousand links and became the front door to english-language anime fandom for most of a dec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Scirus 📖 2001 - 2014 scirus was elsevier's free science search engine, launched in 2001 and reaching 167 million indexed pages. it looked past journals into patents and the pages researchers kept on department servers, and it was genuinely good at it. then google scholar arrived, did most of the same job inside a box ev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Groovle 📖 2007 - 2014 google filed a complaint with the national arbitration forum on 6 november 2009 arguing that groovle.com sat two letters away from its own name. the panel answered that groove and groovy are not google, and a small canadian company kept the domain. groovle went on selling decorated google homepages |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Quaero 📖 2005 - 2013 quaero is latin for i seek, and it was announced in april 2005 by the president of france and the chancellor of germany as the european search engine that would answer google. germany left eighteen months later over an argument about whether search meant text or pictures. the european commission cle |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Ekolay 📖 1999 - 2013 doğan online built the portal that taught turkish households the word internet, then spent a decade watching facebook take the audience off it. the last day ekolay.net served its own front page was 31 december 2013. on 1 january the domain started answering with a redirect, and the name was handed t |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Iceape 📖 2006 - 2013 moritz muehlenhoff sent the email on 16 december 2013 and it ran to a few lines: security support for iceape had to stop early, users should move to iceweasel for the browser and icedove for the mail. iceape was the mozilla suite with the logos taken off it, renamed because debian would not ship art |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Tencent Soso 📖 2006 - 2013 tencent had qq, the dominant chinese instant messenger of the era, and it wanted a search engine to match. so it built soso in 2006 and bolted the search box into qq. seven years later the market share was still in single digits and baidu was still the default. tencent paid 448 million dollars for a |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Soso 📖 2006 - 2013 tencent owned the messenger that nearly every person online in china had open, and it pointed that audience at its own search engine for seven years. soso got to third place and one survey briefly put it second, and it never got near baidu. on 16 september 2013 tencent paid $448 million for a third |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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QtWeb 📖 2008 - 2013 one executable, no installer, nothing written into the machine you borrowed. qtweb was a webkit browser built for people using computers they did not own, and its last release landed on 9 september 2013 with no announcement attached. the download page stayed up for another seven years serving a buil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo China 📖 1999 - 2013 yahoo opened its chinese portal in 1999, bought the toolbar company 3721 for $120 million in 2003, and by 2005 had given up on running the place itself. it handed the entire china operation to alibaba as part of a billion dollar investment, then spent eight years watching somebody else wind its own |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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RockMelt 📖 2010 - 2013 rockmelt opened in november 2010 from tim howes and eric vishria with marc andreessen's name on the cap table and the same pitch flock had been making since 2005. it was a chromium-based browser with left and right "edges" that surfaced your facebook friends and your twitter feeds without you having |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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PubSub 📖 2002 - 2013 bob wyman and salim ismail built it in 2002 around an idea they called prospective search. an ordinary engine holds documents and runs your query against them once. pubsub held the query and ran every new document against it forever, so a search you made in march kept paying out in september. it rea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Yahoo! Stars India 📖 2012 - 2013 25 july 2013 was a bad day to be a small yahoo product. twelve of them were switched off at once and the headline went to altavista, which is how a celebrity aggregator for the indian market ended up with no obituary of its own. stars.yahoo.com pulled tweets and wire photos about bollywood actors an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
AltaVista 📖 1995 - 2013 the first search engine that actually returned useful results. DEC built it to demo their alpha cpus. it was the default search engine of the late 1990s for everyone who knew how to find it. google launched in 1998. by 2003 altavista was dead in everything but name. yahoo finally turned it off in 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Camino 📖 2002 - 2013 camino started in february 2002 as chimera, a side project from dave hyatt and mike pinkerton who thought mac users deserved a cocoa-native browser rather than firefox-on-os-x's xul shell. it shipped as a gecko engine wrapped in apple's native frameworks, with keychain password sync and aqua menus t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Quintura 📖 2005 - 2013 a moscow development team with a holding company in virginia built a search engine that drew you a cloud of related words and let you steer it by hovering over them. mangrove capital put what was reported as the first western venture money into a russian internet company behind that idea. the homepa |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Lucky Sort 📖 2011 - 2013 13 may 2013, 19:21 utc: lucky sort replaced its own homepage with a letter saying it had been bought by twitter, and that was the last afternoon anyone could sign up. topicwatch took a live stream of text, ran it through natural language processing and drew a moving picture of which words were climb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google SMS Search 📖 2004 - 2013 people without data plans were the last real constituency for google sms search, and on friday 10 may 2013 google switched it off without telling them. you texted a question to 466453 and google texted back an answer rather than a list of links. it had run since october 2004, which made it one of th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Kanoodle 📖 1999 - 2013 in october 2004, when every site owner on the web was arguing about how much google was keeping, kanoodle shipped brightads and asked publishers to consider a second option. it matched ads to a page's topic rather than its keywords, and it took the adult inventory adsense would not touch. at its bes |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahooligans! 📖 1996 - 2013 yahooligans was yahoo's kid-safe directory, launched in april 1996 as a hand-curated guide to the open web for children aged about four to fourteen. for a window in the late 1990s it was the destination parents and school librarians pointed kids at because the open web was the open web. yahoo rebran |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Opera (Presto era) 📖 2003 - 2013 presto was the proprietary rendering engine opera software wrote in oslo. it shipped with opera 7 on january 28, 2003 and powered every desktop opera release through opera 12. on february 12, 2013 opera announced that the next major release would drop presto and switch to webkit, which by the time o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
TeaShark 📖 2007 - 2013 one hundred and forty-five kilobytes was the entire browser. teashark shipped in september 2007 as a java midlet for phones that had nothing worth browsing with, and the trick was that it never rendered anything itself. a server farm running webkit opened the page and worked out its layout, then sen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Korea 📖 1997 - 2012 yahoo korea launched in september 1997 with the home-team advantage of yahoo's global brand. naver took first place in 2003 and daum took second in 2005. on 31 december 2012 marissa mayer pulled the plug, ending the first yahoo regional exit of her ceo tenure. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sympatico 📖 1995 - 2012 sympatico was the page that opened when a canadian opened a browser. bell and the other incumbent phone companies launched it on 29 november 1995 alongside their dial-up service, and for most of its life the portal and the isp were the same thing in most people's heads. it ran for years as a joint v |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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CastTV 📖 2006 - 2012 edwin ong and alex vikati built a search engine for video in 2006, back when finding a television episode online meant knowing which of forty sites had it. draper fisher jurvetson led a $3.1m round in 2007 and ron conway and marc andreessen came in behind it. tribune bought the company in december 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Gougou 📖 2007 - 2012 the office of the us trade representative put gougou on its notorious markets list on 13 december 2012, and the site was gone before the month ended. xunlei had opened it in june 2007 as the search box for its download client and claimed five million clicks a day on film searches within weeks. a dec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ozú 📖 1996 - 2012 spain got two homegrown search engines in the same year, and ozú was the one with the andalusian name. it arrived in 1996 alongside olé, back when finding anything in spanish through an american index was close to hopeless. vocento bought it in 2001 and put around 1.5 million euros in. by the end it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google Insights for Search 📖 2008 - 2012 google trends was the public toy. insights for search, opened on 5 august 2008, was the same search-volume data with the controls an advertiser actually needed: category and region filters that went down past the country to city level, plus a rising-queries list that told you what was accelerating i |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Timberwolf 📖 2010 - 2012 six thousand seven hundred and thirty two euros bought an amigaos 4 build of firefox 4.0.1, and the bounty closed seven weeks before the final release candidate shipped. two developers had been chasing gecko on a platform whose next major version never arrived. the source went up on github in 2015 u |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Chomp 📖 2009 - 2012 chomp was a search engine for mobile apps, one of the first tools that let you find apps by what they did rather than by name. apple acquired it on 24 february 2012 for a reported fifty million, killed the android side within weeks, and shut the last iphone-facing surface in september 2012. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Paran 📖 2004 - 2012 kth launched paran in july 2004 by folding its hanmir portal into the user base it had inherited from hitel, and the point of it was to make korea telecom a third power on the korean web. it shipped real things, including the country's first gigabyte mailbox in december 2006, and it never got close |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
OmniWeb 📖 1995 - 2012 omniweb was the indie mac browser the omni group started on nextstep in 1995. it survived the os x transition, switched from its proprietary engine to webkit in version 4.5, and pioneered the vertical-tab drawer with page thumbnails that every modern browser eventually copied. went freeware in febru |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Bixee 📖 2005 - 2012 two ex-yahoo engineers, rajesh warrier and ruban phukan, launched a vertical search engine over india's job listings in october 2005 and spent the next year being sued over it. naukri.com won an injunction in the delhi high court that stopped bixee linking straight through to individual job pages, a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Tenbit.pl 📖 1998 - 2012 tenbit.pl was a polish entertainment portal for teenagers, started in april 1998 and big enough by the mid-2000s that it had its own late-night television show on TVN. at its 2004 peak it pulled around 67 million page views a month from more than 700 thousand people, and that same year it was folded |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Safari for Windows 📖 2007 - 2012 safari for windows was steve jobs walking onto the wwdc 2007 stage and announcing that the mac browser was now also a windows browser. it ran on windows xp and vista from june 2007 through windows 7, never crossed two or three percent share, and got slowly stranded as apple stopped caring. the last |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
BlogScope 📖 2005 - 2012 fifty-seven million blogs and 1.3 billion posts sat on four sun servers in a computer science department in toronto. blogscope searched them and then showed you the shape of a word over time, which words spiked alongside it and where the spike came from. the professor and the phd student who built i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Bluu 📖 2009 - 2012 one man in hungary spent three years writing his own web index because the search engines of the day were not much help with his work. bluu opened to the public in december 2009, dropped its registration wall the following may, and went quiet in august 2011. the team said on facebook that the silenc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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CiaoWeb 📖 1999 - 2012 a car company decided italy needed its own yahoo and put two hundred billion lire behind the idea. the portal launched eight days before the millennium and lost forty-five billion lire in its first full year against twenty-five billion of revenue. fiat handed it to a magazine publisher at the end of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Scroogle 📖 2003 - 2012 scroogle sat between you and google. it ran your search from its own servers and handed the results back on a plain page with the ads taken out, setting no cookie on your machine and keeping no log of what went through it. daniel brandt built it in 2003 and it was answering around three hundred and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Truveo 📖 2005 - 2012 truveo built a crawler that could see video the ordinary web spiders walked straight past, which in 2005 was a real problem worth fifty million dollars to aol. it powered video search across aol's sites and then got its own destination, claiming an index beyond six hundred million clips at the top. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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alpha.gov.uk 📖 2011 - 2012 twelve weeks and 261 thousand pounds bought the british government a working prototype of one website in place of hundreds. it took more than 100,000 visits, collected close to a thousand pieces of structured feedback, and was then taken off the web on purpose. almost everybody who built it went on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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BlogPulse 📖 2004 - 2012 blogpulse was an automated blog search engine and trend analytics service built by intelliseek around 2004, acquired by nielsen buzzmetrics in 2006 and folded into the nm incite joint venture with mckinsey by 2010. it indexed millions of blogs every day, plotted phrase trends on a timeline, and pinn |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Google Code Search 📖 2006 - 2012 russ cox built the engine underneath it, a trigram index feeding a regular expression matcher that could not be made to hang, and google put it in labs on 5 october 2006 with a search box that accepted posix syntax over every open source tarball it could crawl. for five years it was the only place y |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Guruji.com 📖 2006 - 2012 guruji.com was an indian search engine built to understand india better than google did, funded by sequoia and sandstone and started by two iit delhi graduates in bengaluru. its most-loved feature was music search, which found and played bollywood tracks scattered across the web, including plenty on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Aport 📖 1997 - 2012 before yandex won, russia had three serious search engines and aport was one of them. it came out of a software company called agama, launched properly in november 1997, and indexed the russian web at a moment when almost nobody outside russia was trying. golden telecom paid twenty five million doll |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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FindArticles 📖 2000 - 2012 a joint venture between looksmart's search technology and the gale group's licensed archive, put online in 2000 and free to read. by 2007 it reached around eleven million articles going back to 1998, which is why so many search results from that decade still point at it. cnet paid $20.5 million for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Trexy 📖 2006 - 2012 a london browser plugin that sat on top of more than 3,000 search engines and recorded where your searching actually went, built from early 2006 by the australian siblings nigel and megan hamilton. the record was called a trail, it was searchable, and you could publish it so somebody else could walk |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Rollyo 📖 2005 - 2012 rollyo let you name up to twenty five sites you trusted and search only those, which in 2005 read as the correction the web needed. dave pell built it on top of yahoo's index and by the summer of 2006 there were around 150,000 of these searchrolls sitting on the site, most of them made by bloggers f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
kgb 542542 📖 2009 - 2012 on 5 january 2009 a short code opened in the united states where ninety-nine cents bought you a written answer to any question you could fit in a text message. the answer came from a person, one of roughly fourteen thousand contractors kgb called special agents, sitting at a home computer running th |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Yebol 📖 2009 - 2012 hongfeng yin left yahoo with the idea that a search result should look like a homepage for its subject rather than a list of ten links, and yebol opened its public beta on 27 july 2009 claiming coverage of ten million search terms. the plan was every term a person could type, by the following spring |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
BOLT Browser 📖 2009 - 2011 a mobile browser built by a font company. bolt did not render pages on your handset, it rendered them on bitstream's servers and sent down a compressed version of the result, which is how a java phone with almost no memory could open a full desktop site. it passed a million installs inside six month |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Ecocho 📖 2008 - 2011 eight days after launch, google terminated the account that paid for the trees. ecocho had promised two of them for every thousand searches, which is exactly the thing adsense forbids: compensating anyone for running a search. it moved to yahoo inside a week, kept its tree counter ticking on the fro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Like.com 📖 2006 - 2011 like.com was riya's computer vision pointed at shopping instead of at faces. you gave it a picture of a handbag and it gave you back other handbags with the same shape and pattern, which in 2006 was a genuinely hard problem being solved without any of the tools that make it ordinary now. google paid |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Squared 📖 2009 - 2011 google squared was announced on 12 may 2009, three days before wolfram alpha went live, and landed on google labs that june. you typed a category and it came back with a table: a row for every thing it decided belonged in that category, a column for every attribute it decided the category had, each |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Sets 📖 2002 - 2011 2002, and the entire interface was a column of empty boxes. you put honda in one and toyota in the next, pressed the button, and google handed back a list of car makers that nobody had ever taught it. the trick underneath was that a search index already knows which words keep turning up in the same |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Aardvark 📖 2007 - 2011 aardvark was the search engine that routed your question to whichever friend in your network might actually know the answer. google bought it in february 2010 for fifty million dollars. the product lasted about a year and a half inside google before product consolidation killed it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Dictionary 📖 2009 - 2011 a dictionary google ran at its own address for about twenty months. it came out of google translate, got a page of its own in december 2009, and was switched off on 5 august 2011 without a blog post or a notice of any kind. people worked it out when the url stopped answering. the definitions were no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Baidu Guoxue 📖 2006 - 2011 140 million characters of classical chinese, spread over more than a hundred thousand pages, put online by a search company on 12 january 2006. baidu guoxue let you search and read the old books the way you searched the web, with the text licensed from guoxue.com and checked by classical scholars be |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Directory 📖 2000 - 2011 google's copy of the open directory project, launched in march 2000 and reordered by pagerank rather than left in alphabetical order. sixteen top categories, around eighty-six languages, every entry in it placed there by an unpaid volunteer. it was google hedging against its own thesis, in a year wh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Real-Time Search 📖 2009 - 2011 for eighteen months google search had a moving part. you typed a query and a column of tweets scrolled past in real time, updating while you sat there, which no search engine had done before and none has really done since. it worked because google was paying twitter for a feed. on 2 july 2011 the co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
SearchYC 📖 2007 - 2011 for three and a half years the only way to find an old hacker news thread was a site that y combinator had nothing to do with and would not link to. mike cheng built it on new year's eve 2007 and served it from a residential comcast connection until comcast noticed. by then octopart had shipped hnse |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Arora 📖 2008 - 2011 benjamin meyer built a browser out of the demo app that shipped with qt, gave it away under the gpl, and got it running on everything from haiku to os/2 at 1.2 megabytes. then research in motion bought his employer and his contract stopped him working on it. version 0.11.0 landed on 27 september 201 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
GazoPa 📖 2008 - 2011 hitachi put a content-based image search engine on the open web in september 2008 and let anyone draw a rough shape into the box to find pictures matching it. the index topped out near fifty million images against google's billion, and the keyword side was bad enough that reviewers preferred cuil. t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
LeapFish 📖 2008 - 2011 a thousand dollars bought a merchant the top slot for a keyword, for life, on a search engine that was really three other search engines in a frame. eighty salespeople in pleasanton, california worked the phones for dotnext inc while techcrunch was calling the product useless in its headline. leapfi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Blog Search 📖 2005 - 2011 on 26 may 2011 google put the blog search api on a spring cleaning list with a batch of other deprecations, and the service went with it. it had launched in september 2005, back when there was enough blogging in the world to justify a search engine that did nothing else, and its crawler reached a ne |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Flock 📖 2005 - 2011 flock launched in october 2005 from bart decrem and geoffrey arone as a firefox fork that built your social internet straight into the browser chrome. you got a sidebar wired to facebook and twitter, plus a media bar that fed off your flickr account. it pulled in a 2008 webby and several million dow |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Yahoo!Xtra 📖 2007 - 2011 yahoo!xtra was a joint venture between yahoo!7 and telecom new zealand, announced in december 2006 and live on 1 march 2007. yahoo!7 held 51 percent and telecom held the rest, which handed the portal and the mail of the country's largest isp to a company on the other side of the pacific. on 15 april |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
AlltheWeb 📖 1999 - 2011 alltheweb was the search engine you used when you wanted to feel smart about not just defaulting to google. it ran on the fast crawler out of trondheim, indexed two billion pages by 2002, and got bought into yahoo through overture in 2003. yahoo kept the name alive for eight years as a thin re-skin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Kosmix 📖 2005 - 2011 a search startup from the junglee founders that could not out-google google, so it kept becoming other things: vertical search, then auto-built topic pages. walmart bought it in 2011 for the team and turned it into @walmartlabs. the name was gone within weeks and the founders within a year. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Ayna.com 📖 1997 - 2011 in arabic أين is transliterated ayna and means where, which is the correct name for a search engine and one nobody in the english-speaking web ever thought of. ayna.com opened in april 1997 with a box over a directory and spent fourteen years trying to index a language whose words change shape faste |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Forestle 📖 2008 - 2011 a twenty-five-year-old in wittenberg built a search engine in 2008 that promised to protect a tenth of a square meter of rainforest per query and handed 90 percent of its advertising revenue to the nature conservancy. google supplied the results for four days and then cut it off, so it moved to yaho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
ImHalal 📖 2009 - 2011 imhalal opened on 1 september 2009 out of the netherlands, built by reza sardeha after he and his friends got tired of ordinary search engines returning things they had not asked to see. every query came back carrying a haram score, and the top score meant the results were simply withheld. more than |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Lycos 📖 1994 - 2010 one of the early big four search engines (with altavista, yahoo, infoseek) before google. CMU spinoff. went public in 1996. terra networks of spain bought it in 2000 for 12.5 billion dollars at the bubble peak. sold it in 2004 for 95 million. that is a 99.2 percent loss of value over 4 years. cultur |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Viewzi 📖 2006 - 2010 a visual search engine out of dallas that refused to hand back a list. you typed a query and it picked which of its layouts fit, an album wall for a band or a photo grid for a celebrity. it reached beta in april 2008 and stopped being developed later the same year, then sat running unattended until |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Swiftfox 📖 2005 - 2010 eleven cpu-specific binaries of the same browser, cut by one man on a dreamhost account and paid for with a donate button. swiftfox existed because mozilla shipped a single generic linux build and jason halme thought your athlon deserved its own compiler flags. the license he wrapped around those bi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Yahoo! SearchMonkey 📖 2008 - 2010 the microsoft deal is what killed this one. yahoo switched off searchmonkey on 1 october 2010, twenty-nine months after opening it, because bing was taking over the back end of yahoo search and there was nowhere left to plug developer apps in. the idea had been that a site owner could mark up their |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Cuil 📖 2008 - 2010 the search engine that launched on 28 july 2008 with a tagline about indexing more pages than google. anna patterson and her husband tom costello had built it with a small team of ex-google engineers and $33 million in funding. the launch broke under load and the results were widely ridiculed. cuil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Pogodak 📖 2004 - 2010 telekom slovenije paid 8.55 million euros in 2007 for three quarters of interseek, the slovenian company that ran najdi.si at home and ran pogodak everywhere else in the former yugoslavia. the croatian front page claimed 13.2 million indexed documents under two words meaning search smarter, and the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Yedda 📖 2005 - 2010 yedda was an israeli question-and-answer site out of tel aviv. it shipped in early 2006 with semantic search that tried to route a question to the user most likely to answer it. aol bought it in november 2007, sat on it for nearly three years, then in august 2010 wrapped it inside the new aol answer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
SpaceTime 📖 2007 - 2010 eddie bakhash shipped the beta on 4 june 2007 and techcrunch called it pure eye candy, sort of like second life meets firefox. spacetime took your google results and hung them in space as a stack of live web pages you could flick through with the mouse. the last build came out on 10 june 2010. space |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Vision Mobile Browser 📖 2002 - 2010 the browser sat on the phone and the work happened somewhere else entirely. novarra put a server between a java feature phone and the open web, and that server fetched the page and rebuilt it into something a handset with almost no memory could draw. carriers bought it rather than people, so you end |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Google China 📖 2006 - 2010 google spent four years running a search engine that agreed in advance to remove results, on the theory that a filtered google was better for chinese users than a slow one. it never beat baidu and it never got past about a third of the market. in december 2009 someone broke into google's own systems |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Google SearchWiki 📖 2008 - 2010 google shipped searchwiki on 20 november 2008 and hung small controls off every result on the page, so a signed-in user could push a link to the top of their own results or delete it outright. the notes people wrote were public, which meant the comment box under any common query filled with spam and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
KartOO 📖 2001 - 2010 kartoo was the french visual meta-search engine that ran from 2001 to january 2010. results came back as a swf-rendered map of linked blobs, not a list of ten blue links. it was one of the more memorable flash demos of the early 2000s and one of the more impractical ways to actually search the web. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Araby.com 📖 2006 - 2010 araby.com was maktoob's attempt at a search engine that actually understood arabic instead of treating it as a foreign string. it launched in september 2006 out of the biggest arabic portal on the web and had a few hundred thousand users within months. when yahoo bought maktoob in august 2009 the de |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Jippii 📖 1999 - 2010 saunalahti was a finnish internet provider assembled out of a dozen smaller ones, and in 1999 it opened a portal that became the largest web destination in the country. the 2000 stock listing renamed the whole company jippii, and a german acquisition the year after nearly bankrupted it. the portal w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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AmiZilla 📖 2003 - 2009 an anonymous donor known only as a former netscape executive put $4,205.61 into a community pot to get mozilla running on amigaos, then pulled the money back six years later because nothing had been delivered. that withdrawal closed the project on 19 november 2009. what the bounty produced in the en |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
xB Browser 📖 2006 - 2009 the tor project shipped a browser bundle of its own and the reason for torpark stopped existing. steve topletz had put portable firefox and a tor client on a usb stick in september 2006 and released it through the cult of the dead cow's hacktivismo wing, and by february 2008 it had been downloaded m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Kazehakase 📖 2003 - 2009 twenty-nine in japanese numerals reads ni-ku, the word for meat, so this browser put out its releases on the 29th of the month with a piece of meat knowledge attached to each one. underneath the joke was a gtk2 browser with a gecko engine and an interface that could be turned down to almost nothing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Iris Browser 📖 2008 - 2009 a perfect hundred on acid3, scored on a stylus phone in 2009, while shipping desktop browsers were still failing the same test. that was iris, built by torch mobile on real webkit with a javascript engine called squirrelfish extreme under it, for a platform nobody expected to render anything properl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Shiira 📖 2004 - 2009 a mac browser written in japan by makoto kinoshita, with the stated goal of being better and more useful than safari. it ran the same webkit engine underneath, so the whole difference had to live in the window: an exposé view that laid every tab out at full size, a page-turn animation between pages, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
SearchMe 📖 2005 - 2009 searchme gave you your search results as a stack of page screenshots you flipped through sideways, the way itunes showed album covers in 2008. it raised thirty one million dollars, indexed a billion pages and needed three million searches a day to cover its own servers. traffic went the other direct |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Tafiti 📖 2007 - 2009 tafiti was a public silverlight demo from microsoft's platform incubation group that wrapped live search results in an animated ui. it launched on 22 august 2007 at tafiti.com with a left-side carousel for picking between web pages, images, rss feeds or books. a right-side virtual bookshelf let you |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Sesam 📖 2005 - 2009 schibsted owned most of the newspapers norwegians read and decided the country should have its own search engine rather than rent one from california. sesam was properly built. it indexed norwegian news back to 1983 and by 2007 it was among the twelve largest sites in the country. none of that matte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Live Search 📖 2006 - 2009 live search was the brand microsoft tried on its search engine for three years between msn search and bing. it launched as windows live search on 11 september 2006, dropped the windows prefix in march 2007, and was rebranded bing on 3 june 2009. it never broke 10 percent global share. the rebrand wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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MSN QnA 📖 2006 - 2009 microsoft ran a question and answer site for three years and renamed it twice while it was running, which tells you roughly how loved it was inside the building. it went in as windows live qna and came out as msn qna, with a stop at live search qna in between. answering a question paid twenty points |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Spock 📖 2006 - 2009 spock was a vertical search engine for people, indexing 250 million real humans from public sources. cnet named it the most promising startup of 2007. intelius bought it on 30 april 2009 and quietly folded the consumer brand into its own people-lookup business. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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AskMeNow 📖 2005 - 2009 fifty four thousand five hundred and thirty six dollars. that was askmenow's revenue for the whole of fiscal 2007, against a net loss of twenty and a half million and a payroll of thirty two people in irvine, california. the product itself was fine: you texted a question to 27563 and an answer came |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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AT&T Pogo 📖 2008 - 2009 a phone company decided in 2008 that browsing needed to look like flipping through physical objects, hired a toronto 3d shop to build it on top of firefox, and handed out beta invites. eleven months later open text bought the 3d shop and the browser went with the furniture. pogo never got a public r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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SeeqPod 📖 2005 - 2009 seeqpod was a search engine for playable audio and video files on the open web, built out of emeryville in 2005 by a small team with lawrence berkeley national lab roots. you typed an artist name. the site returned a list of mp3 links that existed on other people's servers, playable in the browser. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Wikia Search 📖 2008 - 2009 jimmy wales' attempt at an open-source search engine, launched as a public alpha in january '08 with thirty million pages indexed. by august it held seventy billionths of one percent of the US search market. wales announced the end in march 2009 and the servers came down two months later. the wikipe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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FindWhat.com 📖 1999 - 2009 in september 1999 a small florida company that had been selling search engine placement stopped selling placement and started auctioning it, letting advertisers bid for the top of a results page almost nobody visited directly. the money came from syndicating those paid listings onto sites that did h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Groxis 📖 2001 - 2009 grokker took a search query and gave you back a map. results arrived as nested circles grouped by topic, so you could see the shape of a subject before reading a word of it. it won demogod in 2003 and got written about everywhere, and it never became the thing anyone typed into by reflex. groxis gav |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Empas 📖 1999 - 2009 empas launched in december 1999 as a korean search engine built around natural language queries, and for a couple of years it was the country's second portal by page views. in 2005 it did the most interesting thing in its life: it built a search that indexed the walled content of its rivals, naver's |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Jellyfish.com 📖 2006 - 2009 a shopping search engine earns affiliate commission on every click it sends to a retailer, and in 2006 two founders in middleton, wisconsin decided to hand most of that money back to whoever did the clicking. jellyfish.com opened in beta that june with a reverse-auction game called smack shopping at |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Lycos Europe 📖 1997 - 2009 there were two lycos companies. the american one in massachusetts, and this one, a joint venture between bertelsmann and lycos inc that licensed the name for europe and then went out and bought the european web with it. caramail, multimania, fireball, jubii and spray all ended up here. it floated on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Blazer 📖 2000 - 2009 every palm treo sold between 2002 and 2008 had a browser under the globe icon called blazer, and for a lot of american business users that browser was the mobile web. bluelark systems wrote the first version, handspring bought the company a month after it shipped, and by version 3 the rendering was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Alexa Web Search Platform 📖 2005 - 2009 a dollar per cpu hour, and a dollar for every fifty gigabytes you pushed through it. that was the price of building a search engine on top of amazon's crawl of the web, the same crawl the wayback machine grew out of. google and yahoo handed developers free apis that were capped and did the searching |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Jubii 📖 1995 - 2009 jubii was denmark's first search engine and then its homegrown yahoo, a portal so dominant it reached more than ninety percent of danish internet users at its peak. lycos europe bought it in 2000, and years later shipped the name across the atlantic as a web 2.0 social product for a market that had |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Ms. Dewey 📖 2006 - 2009 microsoft put an actress in a dark room and shot six hundred reaction clips across three days. you typed a word into live search and janina gavankar answered it out loud, while the actual results waited in a narrow column beside her. it ran a little over two years as an advertisement microsoft never |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Nomade.fr 📖 1996 - 2009 nomade.fr opened on 2 july 1996 and spent seven years doing the thing google made unnecessary: paying people to read websites and write a sentence about each one. at its best it held more than 150,000 french-language sites with descriptions good enough that other directories copied them. libertysurf |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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A9.com 📖 2003 - 2008 a9 was amazon's 2003 attempt to be a search engine. it gave you multiple columns at once: web results from google on one side, amazon book search in the middle, reference panels from wikipedia and imdb on the right. peak in 2005 was a single-digit-percent of us search referrals. in 2008 amazon stopp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Accoona 📖 2004 - 2008 a former american president lent it his face and a reigning world chess champion sat down against its toolbar on television. accoona spent four years insisting that artificial intelligence could read a query better than a keyword index could, while drawing about a hundred thousand american visitors |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Netbul 📖 1999 - 2008 netbul opened in 1999 as the first real turkish portal, a yahoo-shaped directory somebody had built by hand, with a search box that could be told to look only at sites from this country. it ran its own newsroom and a chat room and at its best was doing three hundred thousand clicks a day. elif dağde |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Deepfish 📖 2007 - 2008 29 march 2007, three months before the first iphone shipped: microsoft live labs put out an invite-only preview of a mobile browser that did the work on a server and sent the phone a picture of the page. it was fast on hardware that had no business being fast, and it never learned javascript or cook |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Galeon 📖 2000 - 2008 galeon was a gecko browser built for gnome by marco pesenti gritti, first released in june 2000, and for two years it was the quickest way to use the web on linux. then gnome adopted interface guidelines asking applications to strip out options, gritti agreed with them, and most of the people workin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Redlasso 📖 2005 - 2008 redlasso recorded american television and radio off the air. it then gave bloggers a way to cut a piece out of that recording and drop it into a post. the free beta ran from late 2007 and ended up on political and gossip blogs, none of which had any license to the footage. nbc universal and two fox |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Powerset 📖 2005 - 2008 powerset was the semantic-search startup that promised to let you type a question instead of a keyword. barney pell founded it in 2005 with steve newcomb and lorenzo thione as co-founders. they licensed natural language tech from xerox parc and launched a wikipedia-only public demo in may 2008. that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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BrainBoost 📖 2004 - 2008 assaf rozenblatt spent 2004 and 2005 building a search engine that answered the question rather than listing pages that mentioned it, and it tested well enough against the major engines to be bought by answers.com for $4 million in cash and 439,000 restricted shares. the engine then sat inside a com |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Atlas.cz 📖 1997 - 2008 a few people at a prague software firm built a search engine to show a client what microsoft's scripting language could do, and the demonstration turned into one of the three portals the czech internet ran on for a decade. it never caught seznam and by 2006 it was fighting centrum for second place i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Microsoft Live Search Books 📖 2006 - 2008 microsoft's google books rival. launched in beta december 2006 with publisher partners including cambridge, harvard, oxford, mcgraw-hill, pearson, simon and schuster, plus yale. ran for 18 months. on may 23 2008 microsoft announced the closure of live search books and live search academic and pulled |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Netscape Navigator 📖 1994 - 2008 the first browser most people used. it was a real product you could buy in a shrink-wrapped box at the store. microsoft bundled internet explorer with windows for free and killed it over five years. AOL bought it. AOL released the source as mozilla, which became firefox. netscape itself was retired |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
NetCaptor 📖 1998 - 2008 adam stiles wanted the tabs he already had in his html editor to exist in his browser, so he wrote them himself and published simulbrowse on 4 january 1998. renamed netcaptor, it wrapped internet explorer's engine and gave it tabs and pop-up blocking years before either shipped natively anywhere. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ThunderHawk 📖 2001 - 2008 $49.95 a year, or $5.95 a month, to look at the web on a phone in 2002. the handset never rendered anything: bitstream's servers fetched the page, laid it out at full desktop width, compressed the result and sent down a picture of the real internet instead of the stripped wap version everyone else w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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astalavista.box.sk 📖 1994 - 2007 dormant the warez search engine. you typed in a piece of software (photoshop, winrar, 3ds max, anything) and got a list of sites and FTPs that hosted the crack or serial. swiss-hosted under.box.sk because everyone knew that domain handler did not police what you put under it. peak was the late 1990s and ear |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Minimo 📖 2003 - 2007 chris hofmann left netscape in 2003 and started a project to make gecko run on a handheld with sixty four megabytes of ram. nokia paid for much of it and doug turner ran it for four years. what shipped was a correct browser on hardware that could not carry it, and on 27 november 2007 turner announce |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
WiseNut 📖 2001 - 2007 it launched in september 2001 with a crawler of its own and one real idea: every search came back sorted into topic groups instead of one flat list. the press called it a google killer for about a month. looksmart bought it six months later for nine and a quarter million in stock, kept it running as |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Blingo 📖 2004 - 2007 blingo was the american search-and-sweepstakes hybrid that put a google search box on top of the publishers clearing house prize model. you entered a query and, at random moments during the day, you might win a small prize just for having searched near a winning second. pch bought it on 13 july 2006 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AWeb 📖 1996 - 2007 yvon rozijn wrote a web browser for the amiga in 1996, two years after commodore had gone bankrupt and the whole platform was supposed to be finished. aweb was quick on hardware everyone else had written off, and it got a commercial release through amitrix under the name aweb-ii. in 2002 rozijn open |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Oregano 📖 2000 - 2007 a deputy mayor cut a tape to open a computer show in wakefield on 20 may 2000, and the product sharing top billing with the ceremony was a web browser. oregano came out of oregan networks in cambridge, and castle technology sold it in a box and later bundled it with the iyonix pc. it was the last co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Singingfish 📖 1999 - 2007 singingfish crawled the web for sound and moving pictures instead of text, which in 1999 was a hard problem nobody else particularly wanted. it ended up as the search box inside windows media player and realplayer, which meant most of the people using it never learned the name. thomson bought it in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Ghostzilla 📖 2002 - 2007 the problem it solved was the cubicle. ghostzilla drew a gecko browser inside the window of whatever you already had open, usually outlook, drained the color out of the page so it read like plain mail, and disappeared the instant your cursor left the region. the author never gave a name. mozilla fil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
GlobeXplorer 📖 1999 - 2007 walnut creek, california, 1999. four executives out of a survey firm spun a nasa orthophoto project into the first business built on selling aerial and satellite imagery over the web, and the wall street journal put it on the front of the business section under the headline now you, too, can be a sp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Bomis 📖 1996 - 2007 bomis was a san diego web portal founded by jimmy wales and two chicago friends in 1996. it ran webrings around a babe search engine for the revenue side. about $100,000 of bomis cash funded nupedia in 2000 and wikipedia in january 2001. the brand was inactive by 2007 once the wikimedia foundation a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Todito.com 📖 1999 - 2007 todito was built in 1999 by a private university in monterrey and turned into one of mexico's largest consumer portals with television money behind it. the part that mattered was not the portal, it was the todito card: prepaid internet access on a card you bought at a shop, aimed at everyone who cou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
IBM Home Page Reader 📖 1998 - 2006 home page reader was a browser that spoke the page out loud, built at ibm out of chieko asakawa's research in tokyo and sold from 1998 onward. the thing that made it matter is that it read the html rather than the pixels, so it knew a heading was a heading and a form field was a form field instead o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Torget.se 📖 1996 - 2006 904 million kronor is what the swedish post office eventually admitted it had spent on a website meant to sell things. the visitors came for the chat and the personal homepages instead, and posten never found a way to bill anyone for that. the brand got passed down a line of owners after 2001 and wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Google Answers 📖 2002 - 2006 google answers was the paid question-and-answer service google ran from 18 april 2002 to 30 november 2006. you wrote a question, you offered a bounty starting at two dollars, and one of a small pool of vetted researchers picked it up and posted an answer. google took 25 percent of the bounty plus a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Deepnet Explorer 📖 2004 - 2006 version 1.5.3 beta 3 shipped on 19 october 2006 and nothing ever followed it. deepnet security in britain had built the first browser to pair a gnutella client with a phishing alarm, all of it sitting on internet explorer's rendering engine, which is exactly where the security pitch fell apart. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Daypop 📖 2000 - 2006 daypop was a blog and news search engine run as a one-man project by dan chan from late 2000, started during the us presidential election while dan was living in hong kong. it crawled rss feeds and news sites at higher frequency than a general crawler would and surfaced what was popular across blogs |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Application Suite 📖 1998 - 2006 the whole internet as one program. browser, mail and news reader, page editor, irc client, address book, all of it out of the netscape communicator source code that went open on 31 march 1998. it took four years and a full engine rewrite to reach 1.0, and by then the project had already decided the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Zeal 📖 1999 - 2006 zeal was a web directory written by unpaid volunteers who earned points toward donations to charities they chose themselves. you passed a test before you could submit a listing and passed more tests to run a category. looksmart bought it in october 2000 for twenty million dollars and fed the volunte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Teoma 📖 2001 - 2006 a search engine that ranked pages by authority inside a subject, not across the whole web. teoma came out of rutgers in 2001 with a smart idea about hubs and communities, and it was good enough that ask jeeves bought it that same year and put it under the hood. the teoma name lasted until 2006, when |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Internet Explorer for Mac 📖 1996 - 2006 internet explorer for mac was a real separate browser, not a port. it had its own rendering engine called tasman that was more standards compliant than the windows version of the era. it shipped as the default browser on mac os 8.1 under the 1997 apple-microsoft deal, lost the desktop to safari, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
AOL Explorer 📖 2005 - 2006 aol released a free tabbed browser in july 2005 and built it on trident, the rendering engine inside internet explorer. it could do that because microsoft had settled with aol two years earlier for seven hundred and fifty million dollars plus a seven-year royalty-free license to the browser aol had |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
NeoPlanet 📖 1997 - 2005 neoplanet was a trident-shell browser released in 1997 by bigfoot international, a new york company that licensed the internet explorer rendering engine and wrapped it in a fully skinnable interface. the product combined browsing with mail and chat under one branded shell, with partner versions for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
SpeechBot 📖 1999 - 2005 compaq's research lab put speechbot on the web at the end of 1999, running speech recognition across public radio archives so you could search the words inside an audio file. almost nothing else was attempting it. the transcripts were wrong often enough that the site said so on the front page, and t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
GoTo.com / Overture Services 📖 1997 - 2005 the first company to make money on paid search clicks. bill gross at idealab spun out goto.com in 1997 and ran the first live ppc auction in february 1998. the company became overture services in october 2001. on october 7 2003 yahoo bought it for $1.63 billion as the company that was already poweri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Espotting Media 📖 2000 - 2005 two men in their twenties left an advertising agency in the middle of the dot-com crash and started selling keywords in london, which in 2000 was a business nobody in europe had a name for yet. espotting ended up filling the sponsored block on yahoo, lycos, altavista and ask jeeves across the contin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
HotJava 📖 1995 - 2004 sun wrote a web browser in its own brand new language to prove the language was good for something, and for a short window it was the only browser on earth that would run an applet. then netscape licensed java and shipped applet support inside a browser people already had, which left hotjava as a de |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
마이엠 (MyM) 📖 2004 - 2004 one hundred megabytes of free email in february 2004, when hotmail was still handing out two. mym opened on the 9th after eighteen months of preparation by plenus, changed owners in april when cj internet bought its parent, and was switched off in stages from that august. korean press gave it the re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Beonex Communicator 📖 2000 - 2004 ben bucksch wanted a mozilla suite you could hand to someone who actually needed privacy, with kerberos and openpgp wired in rather than bolted on afterward. he shipped preview releases for three and a half years and never reached 1.0. on 2 march 2004 he said there would be no new releases until the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Netscape Netcenter 📖 1997 - 2004 netscape netcenter was the portal netscape built on top of its own browser's default homepage in 1997. at peak in 1998 it had around twenty million monthly visitors and stood next to yahoo and excite in the portal war. aol acquired the whole company in march 1999. the netcenter brand was folded down |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
ANT Fresco 📖 1994 - 2004 a cambridge company that had been making ethernet cards for the acorn archimedes wrote the first real web browser for risc os, then spent ten years selling it to anyone building a device with a screen and no keyboard. fresco shipped in acorn's network computer rom, in a media player, and in a millio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Oingo 📖 1998 - 2003 two caltech graduates built a search engine that matched meanings instead of words, using a princeton lexicon that had taken fifteen years to assemble, and launched it into a market that had already decided search was finished as a business. almost nobody came. what did work was the side product, a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Inktomi 📖 1996 - 2003 inktomi was a 1996 spinoff out of uc berkeley, founded by eric brewer and paul gauthier on the premise that you could parallelize a web index across cheap commodity machines instead of one big box. the name came from a lakota spider legend, the cube logo from a designer named tom lamar. it was the s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Northern Light 📖 1997 - 2003 dormant the search engine that grouped your results into folders. it indexed the open web and a separate "special collection" of paid premium content (papers, journals) that you could buy individual articles from. ran from 1997 to 2003 as a public site. then it pivoted to enterprise customers and closed the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Vizzavi 📖 2000 - 2003 vizzavi was one of the most expensive startups in internet history and almost nobody remembers using it. in 2000 vodafone and vivendi poured a planned 1.6 billion euros into a single joint venture meant to be the front door to the mobile web across europe, the portal for your phone and, eventually, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Arianna 📖 1996 - 2003 italy got its own crawler in 1996, out of a university department in pisa and a portal called italia on line. for a few years arianna was where the italian web found itself, in a straight fight with virgilio over the same readers. then the portal was sold twice in four years, and the search box came |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Internet Explorer for UNIX 📖 1997 - 2002 microsoft's browser for solaris and hp-ux, given away free for the x window system from november 1997. it existed because netscape held something like 85 percent of the market and unix workstations were the corner of that market microsoft could not reach from windows. rather than write a browser for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Direct Hit 📖 1998 - 2002 direct hit launched in april 1998 from boston, founded by gary culliss and mike cassidy. its pitch was that the rank of a result came from how often searchers had clicked it before, a click-based popularity engine patented in three us filings. ask jeeves announced the acquisition on 25 january 2000 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
RealNames 📖 1996 - 2002 realnames sold you your own name in the address bar of internet explorer, which worked because it had bought the address bar of internet explorer. microsoft took a fifth of the company and a guarantee of forty million dollars for the privilege, and when the second installment came due in may 2002 th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Netsgo 📖 1997 - 2002 june 1997, and sk telecom put a service on the phone lines that was half web portal and half korean pc communication network, with its own browser shipped on a cd so you could be in both at once. the install disc said let's go to the network under the logo. broadband arrived and made the phone-line |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Cadê? 📖 1995 - 2002 in september 1995 two electrical engineering students in são paulo built a search engine for the brazilian web. by 2001 it was the largest search site in brazil with millions of monthly visits. starmedia bought it in 1999. yahoo bought it from starmedia in january 2002 and slowly absorbed it into ya |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Lokace 📖 1994 - 2002 lokace went up in 1994 as the first search engine anyone built in france, out of a group of seven people whose next product was caramail. it crawled french pages and returned results that were never very good, which in a category where second best has no constituency was the only fact that counted. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
DR-WebSpyder 📖 1997 - 2002 caldera uk took michal polak's arachne, bolted novell's networking onto it, and shipped a dos web browser that could boot from one floppy on a 386 without touching the hard disk. it was renamed four times in five years as the company that owned it was spun out, renamed again and auctioned, and the a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
MediaBrowser 📖 2000 - 2001 mark c. brown's company sold one idea, which was internet explorer with somebody else's artwork wrapped around it. nintendo liked that idea enough to put pokemon gold and silver skins on a cd-rom and hand them out with preorders in late 2000. fourteen months later the company was in chapter 7 owing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Zip.net 📖 1998 - 2001 zip.net was brazil's first free webmail and then, for about three years, one of the country's largest portals. marcos de moraes launched zipmail in august 1998 and passed a million accounts in eight months. portugal telecom paid $365 million for it in february 1999, the first big brazilian internet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Excite 📖 1995 - 2001 excite was one of the half-dozen us portals you saw on every late-90s magazine cover. six stanford undergrads built it. by 1997 it was the sixth-most-visited site on the web, and in january 1999 it bet the company on a $6.7 billion stock merger with the @home cable network. when chapter 11 came in o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
El Sitio 📖 1997 - 2001 el sitio was the argentine answer to the late-nineties latin american portal race. roberto vivo-chaneton and roberto cibrian-campoy founded it in 1997 in buenos aires as a spanish- and portuguese-language content portal aimed at the whole region. it went public on nasdaq under ticker lcto on 10 dece |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Orientation.com 📖 1996 - 2001 thirty-two country doors, from albania to uganda, under a logo that read think globally, search locally. it began in 1996 as asia's web directory and grew into a search service for the parts of the world the american engines had not gotten around to. somewhere between july and september 2001 it stop |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Yupi.com 📖 1996 - 2001 $150 million went into a spanish language portal in miami beach between 1996 and 1999, and something like $50 million came back out in 2001 when a microsoft and telmex joint venture bought what was left of it. two thirds of the staff had already been cut the previous december. by july 2001 yupi.com |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Yupi 📖 1996 - 2001 yupi was one of the big spanish-language web portals of the late 1990s, run out of miami beach with offices across latin america and spain. founded in 1996, it rode the same wave as starmedia and el sitio, betting that the spanish-speaking internet would need its own front page. it never got the cha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Magellan Internet Guide 📖 1995 - 2001 magellan was a human-edited web directory with star-rated reviews, launched in august 1995 by the mckinley group out of berkeley. it had editorial staff who actually visited and rated sites. excite bought the mckinley group in june 1996 for about $18 million in stock, kept magellan limping along as |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
DoDots 📖 1999 - 2001 fifty companies and four hundred independent developers were building on it when the money stopped. dodots took the chrome off a website, shrank what was left to one job in one small window, called that a dot, and shipped a windows client to keep your dots in. the farewell letter went up in march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Deja News 📖 1995 - 2001 the searchable archive of usenet, the part of the internet most people had stopped looking at by the time deja news made it searchable. google bought it for the archive, not the brand, and the brand evaporated inside a quarter. what survived is groups.google.com, a museum that pretends to be a forum |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Infoseek 📖 1994 - 2001 i remember infoseek from the 1998-1999 dial-up window. you tried altavista first, then infoseek if altavista was slow that day. it had a clean interface and a fast result page for the era. disney bought it, made it into a portal, then closed the portal a year later when the dot-com money stopped. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
NetKing 📖 1995 - 2001 yitzhak rabin was shot on 4 november 1995, and within hours a tel aviv advertising agency had put up a page where you could light a memorial candle in a browser. that page became netking, one of the first commercial websites in israel and for a few years the third name in a market that walla and iol |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Go.com 📖 1999 - 2001 go.com was disney's portal play. it launched in january 1999 by stitching together infoseek's search engine with disney's stable of media brands. two years later disney announced the shutdown and took a 790 million dollar write-down. the url survived as a disney landing page, but go.com as a search- |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Dogpile 📖 1996 - 2001 a search engine that was not really a search engine. dogpile never crawled the web itself, it took your query and handed it to altavista and every other engine at once, then stitched the answers back together. in 1997 that was a smart hedge, because no single engine indexed enough of the web to trus |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
WebCrawler 📖 1994 - 2001 the first search engine that read the full text of every page it found, not just the titles. a graduate student at the university of washington built it in his spare time in early 1994, and within a year it belonged to aol and answered a million queries a day. excite bought it, then let it coast on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Spyglass Mosaic 📖 1994 - 2000 a company in illinois licensed the mosaic name from ncsa, rewrote the browser properly, and sold it to anybody who wanted one. microsoft was one of the buyers. the contract paid spyglass a quarterly fee plus a cut of what microsoft earned on the software, and microsoft then gave the software away, s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
SavvySearch 📖 1995 - 2000 a graduate student at colorado state university named daniel dreilinger put savvysearch on the web in march 1995, built on one idea: rather than crawl the web itself, work out which of the other engines were worth asking and ask them in parallel. it kept score of which sources answered well and how |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Lycos' TOP 5% 📖 1995 - 2000 nineteen categories and a badge you could not award yourself. lycos' top 5% came out of point communications in 1995 and spent five years telling the web which twentieth of itself was worth your modem time. the directory was still answering at point.lycos.com in october 1999. by the end of february |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
ZAZ 📖 1996 - 2000 a software company in porto alegre put a large part of brazil online, and for three years zaz was the second biggest thing on the brazilian web. telefónica paid two hundred and fifty million dollars for half of it in june 1999, took the rest in january, and had the name gone by the first week of feb |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
GauchoNet 📖 1996 - 2000 gonzalo arzuaga was a business student in buenos aires who spent the summer of 1996 in a university computer lab typing argentine websites into a list by hand. that list became gauchonet, the first argentine search directory, and starting it cost about two thousand pesos, most of which went on a com |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Olé 📖 1996 - 2000 spain had a search engine before it had google, and a catalan research foundation built it with public money and then sold it to the employee who had proposed it for two hundred thousand pesetas. he ran it out of a basement under his mother's nursery and it passed a million visits inside three month |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Pathfinder 📖 1994 - 1999 time warner opened pathfinder in october 1994 as a single front door to every magazine it owned, and spent somewhere north of a hundred million dollars keeping it open. the problem arrived early. people wanted time.com rather than a path through pathfinder, and the magazines wanted their own names o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Arena 📖 1993 - 1998 arena was not a product. dave raggett wrote it in 1993 so there would be something on screen that could display the html draft he was proposing, and it spent the next few years as the place where the web's committee work got tested before anybody shipped it. cascading style sheets ran in arena first |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
IBM WebExplorer 📖 1994 - 1998 ibm wrote a browser for os/2, shipped it with warp in 1994, and took the team apart almost immediately afterward. two years later warp 4 arrived carrying a link to download netscape instead, inside ibm's own operating system. the final release, version 1.2, went out on 25 november 1998, four years a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Netscape Netcaster 📖 1997 - 1998 netscape's answer to the idea that the web should arrive on its own instead of being fetched. it shipped inside communicator in 1997 under the codename constellation, gave you channels you subscribed to and a webtop that took over the entire screen, and it was cut from version 4.5 about sixteen mont |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
SlipKnot 📖 1994 - 1998 in 1994 a lot of people had internet access that could not run a browser. what they had was a shell account on somebody's unix machine and a terminal program to reach it. slipknot sat on the windows side of that line and drove the remote machine for you: it typed lynx commands down the wire, collect |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
AMSD Ariadna 📖 1995 - 1998 five incompatible ways to write russian text were in circulation in 1996, and a page that guessed wrong arrived as a wall of latin garbage. a moscow firm called amsd built a browser that read the bytes and worked out the encoding for itself, with a russian interface and a fifty thousand word diction |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Four11 📖 1994 - 1997 four11 was a white pages for the internet, started in menlo park in 1994 by michael santullo and larry drebes, back when finding somebody's email address meant asking a person who already had it. the directory was the business. rocketmail, the free webmail it put out in 1996 as a sideline, is the pa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
NCSA Mosaic 📖 1993 - 1997 the first browser most people saw the web through. released april 1993 from ncsa at the university of illinois. ran on windows, mac, and unix. it showed images inline, which sounds boring now and was a revolution then. development stopped january 1997 once netscape and ie had taken over. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
World Wide Web Worm 📖 1994 - 1997 the worm crawled the web by itself in 1994, at a moment when finding a page meant reading a list somebody maintained by hand. oliver mcbryan built it at the university of colorado, got about 110,000 documents into an index and accepted queries written as perl regular expressions. it was the first in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
iGuide 📖 1996 - 1997 rupert murdoch and mci spent 1995 planning an online service big enough to take on america online, and what came out of it in march 1996 was iguide, a web portal with tv listings and a movie database and a floating javascript toolbar. the megadeal behind it collapsed first. ten months after launch n |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Cyberjack 📖 1995 - 1997 six developers in south africa wrote a whole internet suite, roughly one application each, and delrina shipped it in 1995 as the first 32-bit way to get on the web from windows 95. the browser could not draw tables and there was no mail client in the box. symantec bought delrina, patched the table p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
W3 Catalog 📖 1993 - 1996 oscar nierstrasz put a search box in front of the web on 2 september 1993, at the university of geneva, and it was the first one. it crawled nothing: it downloaded the hand-maintained link lists other people were already publishing, then chopped them into paragraphs for a perl script to grep. by 199 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
UdiWWW 📖 1995 - 1996 udiwww was a windows browser written by one person at the university of ulm, and for a few months in 1995 and 1996 it did things netscape could not do. it rendered the proposed html 3 spec down to the math, and it drew png images while the two big browsers were still ignoring the format. version 1.2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
AMosaic 📖 1993 - 1996 version 1.0 went out on 25 december 1993, written by three university programmers who all happened to share a first name. it was the first way an amiga owner could see a web page with pictures in it, and it did several things ncsa mosaic could not, because amigaos handed it capabilities that unix di |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
MacWeb 📖 1994 - 1996 one megabyte of free ram was enough to browse the web in 1994, and macweb was how a lot of mac owners found that out. einet, a research outfit in austin, gave it away and let it ride along on the floppies tucked into internet starter kits. netscape shipped the same year with more of everything and a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Minuet 📖 1994 - 1996 384 kilobytes of memory and a 4.77 megahertz processor was the design target, because that is what the machines in a university computer lab actually were in 1994. the microcomputer support group at the university of minnesota wrote their own mail client, their own gopher client, their own ftp progr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
ViolaWWW 📖 1992 - 1995 pei-yuan wei read a hypercard manual in 1989 and rebuilt the idea on the unix workstations he had access to at berkeley. by march 1992 his viola toolkit had a web browser sitting on top of it, with tables and a stylesheet mechanism at a point when nobody else had either. it ran on x11 or it ran nowh |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
tkWWW 📖 1992 - 1995 joseph wang put a very buggy browser on an mit ftp server on 25 july 1992 and told people to be careful with it. tkwww was written in tcl and tk, which meant the whole interface could be read and rewritten by whoever was running it, and by may 1993 it carried the first wysiwyg html editor on x11. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Line Mode Browser 📖 1991 - 1995 berners-lee's own browser only ran on a next machine, of which there were a few thousand on earth, so the web needed a client that would run on anything with a keyboard. nicola pellow wrote it as a student intern at cern and it worked on mainframes, on ms-dos, on whatever you had. for two years, tel |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
World Wide Web Wanderer 📖 1993 - 1995 the wanderer was a perl script matthew gray ran at mit to answer one question, which was how big the web actually is. it walked outward from a starting point every month and counted, 130 sites in june 1993 and 23,500 by june 1995, which is the reason anybody can draw that curve today. the index it p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Erwise 📖 1992 - 1994 erwise was the first web browser anybody outside a research group could run with a graphical interface, released on 15 april 1992 by four masters students at helsinki university of technology. it drew hyperlinks as underlined text you double clicked and it handled more than one font on a page, at a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Cello 📖 1993 - 1994 every other early browser was written by people who wanted a web. cello was written because a law school had put american case law online and discovered that the lawyers who needed it were all on windows, where no browser existed. tom bruce shipped it as shareware in june 1993 and six versions insid |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
WorldWideWeb (Nexus) 📖 1990 - 1994 worldwideweb was the first web browser, written by tim berners-lee at cern in late 1990 on a next cube, and for a while it was the only one that existed. it was also an editor. you could change a page in the same window you were reading it in, because the man who built it assumed reading the web and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
MacWWW 📖 1992 - 1994 robert cailliau wrote a web browser for the macintosh at cern in 1992, with nicola pellow joining later from the line mode browser. it was the first browser for the classic mac os and the first for any operating system that was not unix, and cern sold it for fifty european currency units. it showed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
JumpStation 📖 1993 - 1994 jonathon fletcher was a systems administrator at the university of stirling in scotland when he built jumpstation, which started indexing on 12 december 1993 and was announced nine days later on the what's new page that shipped with mosaic. it was the first search engine that went out and read the w |