Direct Hit

» see directhit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 2000 i was on a 56k modem in ankara, mostly using altavista with the first hesitant google searches starting to reach turkey. direct hit was in the second tier of us search portals i probably saw without realising it, the kind of result page that appeared when you clicked through certain partner sites. honestly, until the wikipedia trawl for this list i had no concrete memory of clicking the directhit.com homepage at all.

the company was founded in april 1998 in boston by gary culliss and mike cassidy. the patented popularity engine ranked results by how often searchers had clicked a link in past sessions, with a refresh cycle that demoted pages people backed out of fast. in late 1999 they filed for an ipo through robertson stephens. the timing put them squarely in the path of ask jeeves, which had a different ranking story and a similar growth chart.

ask jeeves announced the acquisition on 25 january 2000 and closed it on 3 february, a stock-for-stock deal worth around five hundred million on paper at the peak. one month after that the dot-com bubble broke. ask jeeves spent the next two years drifting through the worst part of the cycle. direct hit was left fallow. when teoma got integrated into ask jeeves through 2001, the standalone directhit.com search was scheduled to close in mid 2002. results kept flowing to a few partner sites and then quietly stopped.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it ranked ~

the popularity engine watched anonymous click data. if more searchers picked the third result than the first for a given query, the third result rose. if they bailed out of a page fast, that page dropped. the idea was a precursor to what google later did with personalisation and clickthrough signal, except direct hit had been doing it as the public ranking method, not a tuning input bolted on the side.

~ the ask jeeves shelf ~

after the acquisition ask jeeves had two competing ranking stacks on the shelf, the direct hit popularity engine that came over with culliss and cassidy, alongside the teoma local-cluster algorithm that arrived in late 2001. they could not run both. teoma won. direct hit results ran through partner sites for a while in 2001 and 2002, then faded out as the standalone home page was retired.

~ what came after ~

the popularity engine idea did not die with directhit.com. google had been using clickthrough as one signal among many since the early years and the broader idea that user behaviour ranks results became standard across the industry. by the mid 2000s the search engines that were left did not advertise this the way direct hit had. the brand vanished, the method survived as a small line in everybody's ranking stack.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »