FindWhat.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

The first two or three lines above a set of search results have been for sale since 1998, and the companies that sold them mostly kept their own names off the page. That was the design. From a dial-up line in Turkey I searched on AltaVista and then on Google like everyone else, and the sponsored block at the top came from an auction house whose name I had no reason to learn. FindWhat.com was one of those houses, and for a few years it was the second largest one in the world.

Three people set up Be-First Internet in March 1998 to sell search engine placement as a service, the pre-history of the whole SEO business. In June 1999 the company reverse-merged into a listed shell called Collectibles America, which is how small internet companies got public that year. Then in September 1999 it launched a pay-per-click engine of its own and took the name FindWhat.com. Advertisers bid on a keyword, the highest bid sat at the top, and the advertiser paid only when someone clicked.

Almost nobody used findwhat.com as a search engine. The business was syndication: FindWhat sold the auction, then placed the winning listings into the paid slots on other people's portals and toolbars and metasearch sites, splitting the click revenue with them. By May 2000 the network was handling two million searches a day. The crash came anyway. The stock went from eighteen dollars in March 2000 to a dollar and a quarter by October, on a year that booked 8.8 million in losses against 2.9 million in revenue.

It survived that, which was rare. The first profitable quarter arrived in June 2001, and by 2002 the company had moved into a 32,000 square foot headquarters in Fort Myers. Then in December 2001 Overture Services sued for patent infringement over the pay-per-click mechanism itself, a suit that ran three years, produced a mistrial in May 2005 and ended with FindWhat paying eight million dollars plus royalties for the right to keep running an auction.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the buying spree ~

In fourteen months the company bought most of what it would ever own. Miva Corp of San Diego went for 8 million in January 2004. Comet Systems, the outfit behind the cursor that turned your mouse pointer into a cartoon character, went for 33.5 million in March. The big one closed on 1 July 2004: Espotting Media, the London pay-per-click network that filled the sponsored slots on Yahoo and Lycos across Europe, in a deal reported at somewhere between 170 and 190 million dollars.

That made FindWhat the number two paid-search network on two continents, and it lasted less than a year in that shape. On 6 June 2005 the company retired both brand names and became MIVA, Inc., taking the name of the smallest thing it had bought. The 2005 accounts came in at a 131 million dollar loss. Craig Pisaris-Henderson, one of the founders and by then chief executive, resigned in April 2006.

~ the funny part ~

Look at what a search advertising company owned in 2004 and the era explains itself. Alongside the keyword auctions on both sides of the Atlantic it owned Comet Cursor, a browser add-on that most people got without meaning to and that changed the shape of their mouse pointer. Those were adjacent businesses at the time. Both of them sold attention the user had not deliberately handed over.

The end was quiet by comparison. On 12 March 2009 the MIVA Media division, the ad network and the findwhat.com domain with it, went to Adknowledge for 11.6 million dollars, less than a tenth of what Espotting alone had cost five years earlier. On 8 June 2009 the leftover company renamed itself Vertro and changed its ticker from MIVA to VTRO. Google had spent the decade making the same auction work better, on a page people actually went to.

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