History Search Engines - Infoseek

Infoseek – Born in 1994

 

Infoseek, also known as the “big yellow,” was founded by Steve Kirsch in 1994. At the start in January 1994, InfoSeek was a pay-for-use service. The fee service was dropped in August 1994 and Infoseek was re-presented as Infoseek Search in February 1995.

Infoseek’s position in the search engine world was accelerated in 1995 by a deal with Netscape in which it became the default Netscape search engine. In June 1996, Infoseek went public and by September the next year served 7.3 million visitors per month.
Infoseek uniquely featured a very complex system of search modifiers including Boolean modifiers. In November 1996, InfoSeek introduced Ultrasmart/Ultraseek and redesigned its website the next year to include channel or directory information. By March of 1998, Infoseek included a search page with advanced search techniques. Infoseek also uniquely offered a free web hosting service without advertising and had no limit on the amount of storage space for users.
In the summer of 1998, 43% of Infoseek was bought by Disney. From this point forward Infoseek was part of the Disney Corporation’s vast media business. The deal included Infoseek acquisition of Starwave Corporation, including ESPN.com and ABCNews.com. Infoseek’s technology was then merged with Starwave’s to form the Go.com network. In July 1999, Disney had a 72% interest in Go.com and Disney’s media interest included Disney.com, Family.com, ABC.com, ABCNews.com, and ESPN.com.
Aside from its relationship with Disney, Infoseek continued to change. In September 1998, Infoseek began offering a combination of manually-reviewed and traditional web-search results. The next month, Infoseek took over Excite as the default search engine on Microsoft’s WebTV and Infoseek Express, a free software website, was launched. In 1999, Li Yanhong, an Infoseek engineer, moved to Beijing, China and co-founded the search engine Baidu.
In the summer of 2000, Infoseek’s Ultraseek Server software technology was sold to Inktomi and renamed Inktomi Enterprise Search. In December 2002 (prior to Yahoo!’s purchase of Inktomi) Ultraseek was sold to a competitor Verity Inc. Verity re-established the Ultraseek brand name and development of the product until it was acquired by Autonomy PLC in December 2005. Autonomy continues developing and marketing Ultraseek’s site search.
In February 2001, many Infoseek employees tried to collectively buy out Infoseek from Disney when Disney laid off the entire Infoseek staff. Today, the Infoseek.com domain forwards to Go.com and the brand name is unused in North America. Only in Japan (as Infoseek Japan) and Australia (Infoseek Australia) is the Infoseek name used.