Infoseek

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

~ the obit ~

i remember infoseek from the 1998-1999 dial-up window. our home modem was 33.6k on a ttnet line. you opened netscape navigator, the address bar suggested whatever you typed last, and that usually meant altavista or infoseek depending on the day. infoseek had a cleaner result page than altavista and a faster response than lycos. for about six months it was the one i used most.

steve kirsch founded it in january 1994 in sunnyvale, with the original idea of selling pay-per-query searches to libraries and corporations. that did not work. he relaunched as a free public search engine in february 1995, signed a default-search deal with netscape navigator a few months later, and rode that traffic into the 1996 ipo at $12 per share.

by 1997 infoseek was the fifth most-visited site on the web. by february 2001 it was gone, swallowed by disney and then closed alongside the go.com portal.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the disney money started arriving in 1998. mickey paid for a 43% stake and used infoseek as the search layer for a portal called go.com, the network designed to compete with yahoo by bundling abc news and espn under one disney roof. infoseek the standalone search engine continued for a while as a brand, but the engineering attention shifted to running go.com queries.

by 1999 disney owned all of infoseek. the company's enterprise search product, ultraseek server, was sold to inktomi in 2000 and lived on for another decade as it got passed through verity and autonomy on its way to hp. but the consumer search engine, the part with the magnifying-glass logo on a green background, was now just one tab inside a disney portal.

~ the cracks ~

google launched in september 1998. by 2000 anyone who tried google's clean results page noticed the gap. infoseek's behavioral targeting algorithm called ultramatch had been considered clever in 1997, but it was based on click-frequency, not link-graph analysis. google's pagerank ate everything that did not adapt fast enough.

disney was not built to compete on search infrastructure. by mid-2000 go.com was burning $500 million a year as a portal, and disney announced in january 2001 that it would write down the entire go.com investment and exit the dot-com business.

~ the long tail ~

infoseek.com still exists as a redirect to go.com in north america. in japan it lives on under rakuten as rakuten infoseek, a separate company that licensed the brand in 1999 and just kept using it after disney lost interest. the result is that you can still type infoseek.co.jp in 2026 and get a working portal, even though the american brand has been dead for twenty-five years.

steve kirsch went on to start propel software and abaca technology, then later became known for things outside the tech world. but for one specific 1996-1998 window, infoseek was where i actually went to find anything, and i remember the typing of that name into a 33.6k modem and the wait for the result page to come back.

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