Go.com

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

~ the last words ~

go.com never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a 1999 us-coded portal whose entire value proposition was "disney media inside a search box", which makes sense if you grew up on abc news and espn and means very little if you did not. i was in ankara on a 33.6k modem. my front door to the web was yahoo and altavista by then. disney's portal was something i would have read about years later in a list of dot-com failures.

disney registered the domain in january 1998 and launched the portal january 15, 1999. the engine underneath was infoseek, which disney had bought in pieces through 1998 and 1999. the idea on paper was sound: bundle a search engine with disney's media brands and become the default american home page. yahoo had done it without owning any media. disney owned the media but no search engine. infoseek closed the gap.

the gap closed too late. by 1999 yahoo was already the habit, and aol owned the dial-up audience that disney wanted. msn was sitting as the default home page on every windows install on top of all that. go.com had to convert people who already had a portal. it spent enormous amounts of money on tv ads and got modest share in return. disney announced the shutdown on january 29, 2001 with a 790 million dollar write-off and around 400 layoffs.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch logo was a green stoplight with the word "go" on it. that turned out to be a problem. a smaller search company called goto.com sued disney for trademark infringement, and in september 2000 a federal court agreed. disney was ordered to pay 21.5 million dollars and to stop using the green-stoplight mark. the rebrand to a yellow-stoplight version cost more money on top of the lawsuit.

infoseek as a search engine was technically respectable in 1999. it indexed billions of pages and had a reasonable relevance ranking. but it was bolted onto a portal that was bolted onto a media company that had just lost its logo, and the layered attention drained the engineering team's focus. by mid-2000 the search results were noticeably staler than the competition.

~ how it actually ended ~

"shutdown" is a word that needs a footnote here. disney announced in january 2001 that it would close go.com, take the write-off, and lay off the staff. but the url did not actually disappear. in march 2001 it was switched over to use goto.com's search results, the same goto.com that had won the lawsuit a few months earlier. for a while go.com kept running with someone else's search engine inside it.

by 2013 disney had drained the last of the portal away. go.com became a static branded landing page that linked out to disney's network of media properties. the search box was removed. the portal era ended quietly, the way most portals ended, with nobody noticing because nobody had used it as a home page since 2002.

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