Search engines that are no longer with us

AltaVista , in the mid-90s, the most popular search engine, ended up being sold to the company Overture. And this is not the only example of how the largest search sites cease to exist. Those who survived, too, have a hard time.

Rennie Sullivan, a well-known search engine market expert, summarizes the last decade in his article . He talks about search sites that have ceased to exist, as well as those that have changed the business model and “reborn”.

At first - "a group of suicide bombers." In addition to AltaVista, this group includes five search engines.

Open Text ( 1995-1997 ). This system provided a search on the portal Yahoo, as well as on its own site, quite popular. In the mid-90s, the owners decided to focus on developing search solutions for businesses and achieved success in this field. The search website closed in mid-1997.
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Magellan ( 1995-2001 ). One of the first search engines on the Internet. Its popularity began to fall rapidly after buying from Excite in mid-1996. The site was closed in April 2001.

Infoseek ( 1995-2001 ). Having opened a search engine in early 1995, the creators of Infoseek initially planned to create a paid search service. When the attempt failed, the popular search engine began to earn like everyone else - on banner advertising. Disney Corporation bought a large stake in the company in 1998, after which it made Infoseek a portal. He was renamed Go.com, but he did not make a profit. In 2001, the development of its own search engine was discontinued, and now Go.com uses the services of the search provider Yahoo.

Snap ( 1997-2001 ). Opened by CNET, this search engine first worked on Infoseek, then on Inktomi, and then opened its own catalog of manually compiled links with an original ranking algorithm that took into account the behavior of visitors (the number of clicks on each link). Later the main share in the company was bought by NBC corporation. Now the site presents the results from different sources, and the search engine is testing a new interface in the style of Web 2.0.

Direct Hit ( 1998-2002 ). This search site was born almost simultaneously with Google, and also had in its arsenal innovative technologies to automatically improve search results. The system was used as a search provider on the Lycos and MSN portals, then was bought by Ask Jeeves in 2000. The site was formally closed in 2002.

The list of missing search engines is complemented by a list of those who have radically changed and continue to exist in a new guise.

Lycos (1994; rebirth in 1999). Together with WebCrawler, it was one of the first search engines on the Internet based on a crawler. However, its own robot spider was stopped in 1999, in favor of search results from the AllTheWeb site.

WebCrawler (1994; 2001). Instead of its own engine, WebCrawler has now resorted to meta-search, getting results from several other sites. The project was launched in early 1994 as a research project at the University of Washington. It was purchased by AOL in 1995, then resold to Excite in 1996, and its own robot stopped working in December 2001.

Yahoo (1994; 2002). This portal appeared on the Internet much earlier than Google and AltaVista. Tellingly, he still retains the title of one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Up until 2002, links that were manually selected by the editors were displayed as search results on the Yahoo portal. Only in October 2002, the company abandoned this system in favor of Google search results.

Excite (1995; 2001). The site gained popularity almost immediately after its launch in 1995. The search engine worked using its own crawler. In 1996, the company bought two competitors: Magellan and WebCrawler, but could not tolerate the dotcom crisis. Own crawler was stopped in December 2001.

HotBot (1996; 2002). Opened in May 1996 as part of the Wired holding, this site initially worked on the basis of Inktomi search results, and in 1998 was acquired by Lycos along with other Wired assets. In December 2002, he began a “new life” as a meta-search engine.

Ask Jeeves (1998; 2002). From the very beginning, this search site was different from the others by the fact that a huge staff of more than 100 editors who were involved in improving search results worked here. They analyzed what people were looking for online, and offered sites that best answered user questions. Such a kind of "manual search." This approach has proven itself on popular topics, but was powerless with rare search queries. Therefore, in early 2000, the company Ask Jeeves bought the Direct Hit search engine, but could not benefit from it, so I had to buy Teoma in 2001. As a result, the system was completely transferred to the Teoma engine in 2002.