Austin Internet Marketing Company

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com

Alta went online in late 1995. It started in DEC's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA. The idea for the name AltaVista originally came from a laboratory white board that had been partially erased. The word Alto (of Palo Alto) was juxtaposed beside the word Vista and someone called out, "How about AltaVista!" which led to the name AltaVista, meaning "The view from above." Other notable AltaVista inventions have included the first-ever multi-lingual search capability on the Internet and the first search technology to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages via its translator Babel Fish. It was the Web's first Internet machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites in English to and from Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. Alta also has a multimedia search to explore the web for photos, videos and music, with an estimated index of over 90 million multimedia objects.

AltaVista Timeline
• April 1995 AltaVista is conceived by Digital Equipment Corp. engineers. The idea was to develop a software "spider" to crawl the Web, indexing and presenting the information it found.
• December 1995 AltaVista launched altavista.digital.com. As it later turned out, this was a major blunder.
• 1996 AltaVista is provided exclusive provider status for Yahoo.
• 1996 November Signs with Double-Click advertising broker.
• 1997 Aborted attempt at an IPO by Digital (try 1).
• 1998 Digital is sold to Compaq. Many have speculated that Digital sold it to Compaq for a song ($1, dinner and a movie).
• 1999 Compaq plans an IPO for Alta (try 2).
• 1999 January, Alta became a wholly owned subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation. Compaq purchased Shopping.com in March and Zip2 Corporation in April of that year which are also heavily laced into the portal.
• June 1999 Compaq pays a record $3.3million for the domain name. Altavista.com.
• Aug. 1999 AltaVista is sold to CMGI announces IPO (try 3). All IPO’s fail. In August of 1999, CMGI, Inc. acquired 83% of our outstanding stock from Compaq, and Shopping.com and Zip2 became wholly owned subsidiaries of AltaVista. Later in 1999, AltaVista acquired Raging Bull,
• June 2000 Flat-fee internet service in England is announced as a Hoax. UK Head Andy Mitchell quits saying he wants to spend time with his family (ya right, he was fired).
• Nov 2000, Alta goes through two rounds of job cutting.
• Oct 2000 Alta chief Rod Schrock quits saying wants to spend time with family (ya right, he was fired).
They recently added Ask Jeeves search technology in 1999 (you can now put questions to AltaVista instead of just keywords). After serving results to Yahoo in 1997, AltaVista briefly fed results to MSN but now is 100% on their woo It also features the Open Directory Project list of sites. Dumped Looksmart directory late in 1999 and picked them up again in mid 2000. Dumped ODP in late 1999.
AltaVista claims to have been awarded more search-related patents (60) than any other company in the world.
They also have foreign divisions:
• Oct 99 launched altavista.se, Swedish site
• December 1999 altavista.co.uk, UK site
• February 2000 altavista.fr, French site
• March 2000 altavista.nl, Dutch site
• April 2000 altavista.it, Italian site
• July 2000 altavista.in, India site

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Excite
http://www.excite.com

Founders Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer, and Martin Reinfried The five hackers and one political science major set off at once for the Stanford library to research the best way in which to fill the information search-and-retrieval void. In December of 1994, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, and Institutional Venture Partners invested in Excite with the purchase of a $4000 hard drive.

Went online in Dec 1995. In mid 1996, Excite acquired Magellan and later in 1996 also purchased WebCrawler. Excite also includes its directory service, Excite Channels. In October of 1995, Architext launched the Excite services. Exclusive distribution agreements were signed with Microsoft Network and Netscape. The company officially changed its name to Excite, Inc., and soon after went public with an initial offering of 2 million shares at $17 per share.

Users may also search specific news stories, however news stories are not archived and fall off of the system within a few weeks. Developed and run by Architext in California. It offers both keyword-based searching and also concept-based searching (it will not only search for the terms you type in but also similar terms). Excite also provides an interesting lineup of dynamic pages for various operating systems. There is a specific display for WebTV since webtv in rather unique - webtv users should use the LOOK=webtv option. Non WebTV users can try something like: this to see what the webtv folks are seeing. Excite has lost (mid 1999) its spot as the search engine of choice on AOL Netfind and on Netscape. Now (july 2000) using Looksmart for directory services.

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Fast/AllTheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com

Fast or AllTheWeb.com is owned and operated by Fast Search & Transfer ASA technologies. It went online in mid 1998 with one of the largest databases seen at that time. One of their mainstays has been the development of Multimedia specific search engines. They have one of the largest databases of FTP url's for mp3, wav, ra, and other multimedia file types available. They fed not only FTP search results but also web page results to Lycos.

The company was originally called Fast Internet Transfer. FAST is used as an acronym for Fast Search & Transfer. FAST is a spin-out of Opticom ASA, and was established on July 16, 1997. Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) was formally established in Oslo, Norway, on July 16, 1997.
Fast is also noted as the only major search engine to currently (mid 2000) embrace PHP technology on its home page - which is also noted as the single coolest looking homepage of all search engine companies.

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Infoseek/Go.com
http://www.infoseek.com

(8-25-2000) After toying with the whole site directory model, Infoseek still spiders occasionally. It also is building a large directory of sites cross linked to search results (Go Directory).
Went online in August 1995 as a directory service. However, in late 96, a new full indexing search engine called Ultra went online with 25million URLS. In 1999 a 45% stake of Infoseek was purchased by Disney and is in the process of building a new site called GO.com. It was rumored that Infoseek as a standalone search engine will cease with the start of GO - that did not come to pass. Infoseek briefly fed Cnets Search.com in 97-98.
Jan 1, 1999: Infoseek is now part of the Disney GO network having sold a full percentage stake to Disney.

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Go2Net
http://www.go2net.com

One of the oldest meta search services, MetaCrawler began in July 1995 at the University of Washington. MetaCrawler was purchased by go2net, an online content provider, in Feb. 97. The commercial backing has helped improve the responsiveness of the service. MetaCrawler now powers searches at the Go2Net portal site.

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Google
http://www.google.com

On 3-3-2000 Google added it's page rank algorithm to a branded edition of the Open Directory Project. On July 1, they announced that they would become the premier provider of search results for non-directory matches on Yahoo.

Running as a research project at Stanford University, Google has been online since late 1997. In mid 1999 received a $20 million dollar investment of seed capital that has helped it land the top spot on Netscape's Netcenter.
Google offers some of the most unique results of any search engine. Using a system called PageRank, Google filters a large portion of the irrelevant results. It also has a built in bias towards EDU and GOV sites that is a refreshing change from the other .com spam laden search engines. Google currently lists 25million pages in its database, and is gearing up for a major crawl to put it over 100million pages. On Jun 3, 1999 Google received an influx of seed capital ($25 million) from Sequoia Capital. They have also cut their ties with Stanford and are now operating as a completely standalone engine. In mid 2000 they were chosen as the premier provider of search results on Yahoo.

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HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com

Went online in May 1996. HotBot was owned and operated by Wired Magazine, but Wired Digital was recently purchased by Lycos. Search results are served by the Inktomi database. It formerly used LookSmart for categorized directory of sites listings but has switched to The Open Directory Project in Mid 1999. Paul Gauthier and Eric Brewer at the University of California, Berkeley, originally created Inktomi. Hotbot also uses the Direct Hit click through data to manipulate results.

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iWon
http://www.iwon.com

Backed by US television network CBS, iWon has a directory of web sites generated automatically by Inktomi, which also provides its more traditional crawler-based results. iWon gives away daily, weekly and monthly prizes in a marketing model unique among the major services. It launched in Fall 1999.

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Inktomi
http://www.inktomi.com

Derived from a search engine developed at UC Berkeley. Inktomi was founded in 1996 by two University of California at Berkeley researchers Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier. Working on a federally-funded project, the computer scientists developed a way to achieve supercomputing power at microcomputer prices.

The company's name, pronounced "INK-tuh-me," is derived from a Lakota Indian legend about a trickster spider character. Inktomi is known for his ability to defeat larger adversaries through wit and cunning.
There is an ever-changing list of Inktomi partners: HotBot, AOL Netfind, Yahoo, ICQ, iWon, GeoCities, Search MSN, GoTo, Snap, Aeneid, N2H2, Anzwers.au, Goo.jp, Canada.com, RadarUol, ICQit.com Yahoo, and Searchopolis. Inktomi is also huge in the server cache'ing business in Europe.

Not only noted for its powerful world wide search engine, there also are accomplished in the powerful technology of directory building via spidered page results. Their directory engine uses a technology called "Concept Induction™" to automatically analyze and categorize millions of documents. Concept Induction incorporates algorithms that model human conceptual understanding of information.

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Lycos
http://www.lycos.com

Founded in January 1994, and went online in June 1994. The name Lycos comes from the Latin for "wolf spider.". There are standard search results via Lycos Pro, and categorized listings via WiseWire. Lycos was born from a research project at Carnegie Mellon University by Dr. Michael Mauldin. Infoseek is the first known internet company to base its advertising on CPM (cost per thousand page views) which in now industry standard.

In April 1996, Lycos, Inc. became a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock market system under the symbol LCOS. Having become a publicly traded company just 10 months after it was founded, Lycos holds the distinction of being the youngest company to go public in NASDAQ history.
In April 1998, Lycos acquired WiseWire Corporation (http://www.wisewire.com), whose was noted for their directory building software. WiseWire now powers the Lycos Web Guides, which are automatically and collaboratively built via user input. Other Lycos acquisitions.

They recently purchased Wired Digital - acquiring HotBot search engine in the process. It also has added the ODP directory to it's search lineup.
After a furious acquisition spree in 98-97, Lycos Network now consists of: Gamesville, Tripod, WhoWhere, Lycos Communications Angelfire, Hotbot, Hotwired, Wired News, Quote, Sonique, and Webmonkey. Offices in: Waltham, Mass. (headquarters); New York, N.Y.; Mountain View, Calif.; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles, Calif.; San Francisco, Calif.; and Chicago, Ill. and Miami, Fla. International offices are located in Brazil, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the UK, Spain and The Netherlands.

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Web Wombat Network
http://www.webwombat.com.au

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What-U-Seek
http://www.whatuseek.com

The whatUseek collection provides over 1.3 million search queries per day and pride themselves on providing strong results per any search.

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AOL NetFind
http://www.aol.com/netfind

AOL is now using Inktomi for search results and the Open Directory project for directory results.
AOL formerly used (1996-1997) a co-branded version of Excite in North America. While across the pond in Europe, Aol used a version of Lycos for results.

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Search.com
http://www.search.com

Yet another of Cnet's site. This one has search results fed by Infoseek. There is also a small set of listings built by its own in-house crawling left over from when search.com first went online.

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Goto.com
http://www.goto.com

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Northern Light
http://www.northernlight.com

Northern Light went online in the fall of 1997. NL currently has one of the largest databases on the internet in its directory by using its crawler Gulliver. This once potential star has never produced users and is generally ignored by webmasters as a source of referrals.
Northern Light started in 1995 in the basement of an old mill building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A year and a half later NorthernLight.com went online in August of 1997 with 30 employees. At the end of 1998, they had added precision search enhancements, advanced search forms, a real-time news, thousands of Special Collection publications, and millions of Web pages. Today that has nearly 200 employees.

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ODP: Open Directory Project
http://www.dmoz.org

The ODP is a web site directory built by volunteers. The database now holds approximately 1,200,000 sites (3-3-2000). Netscape, Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista, AOL Netfind, Google, and a host of smaller sites use the ODP.

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LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com

LookSmart went online in Oct. 1996. It currently lists over 600,000 sites in its directory database. LookSmart provides categorized directory listings for AltaVista, HotBot and over 1000 internet access sellers (ISP's). LookSmart was funded by Reader's Digest until late 97 when a group of company investors bought out the RD share.

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Netscape
http://www.netscape.com

Netscape Net center is a major hub for search engine traffic. In Aug 1998, Netscape released the 4.06 version of its browser with keyword searching direct from the location address. Search results are currently fed by Excite with other rotating search engines filling out a "featured engine" list.

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Snap
http://www.snap.com

Another service fed by Inktomi. This one is another of Cnets website factories (how many websites can one company spew out?) and is now owned and operated by NBCi. Snap is setup in a directory fashion of Yahoo or LookSmart. When a search fails, Inktomi feeds results. Snap also has partnerships with Microsoft and NBC.

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Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com

Started by David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they found their home-brewed lists were becoming too long and unwieldy. Gradually they began to spend more and more time on Yahoo!
The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "akebono," while the search engine was lodged on Filo's computer "konishiki" (both machines were named after legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers).

Went live online in August of 1994 and is currently one of the oldest directory services on the net. Yahoo used to be a sentimental favorite of everyone on the net; however that has changed a great deal in the last year. With only an estimated 4% of all submitted sites entering the database, a great deal of bad PR has been building about Yahoo. Webmasters all over the world are quite peeved about Yahoo. Yahoo has been adding alternative options (chat, message boards, free email, home pages, yahoo clubs) like crazy this year try to regain its once dominate audience share. If a search fails on Yahoo (as it often does) results are provided by Inktomi. Also has a separate directory for children called Yahooligans.