Simpli

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Simpli was an early search engine that offered disambiguation to search terms. A user could enter in a search term that was ambiguous (i.e., Java) and the search engine would return a list of alternatives (i.e., coffee, programming language, island in the South Seas).

The technology was routed in brain science and built by academics to model the way in which the mind stored and utilized language. The early technology was derived heavily from WordNet, which was invented by George A. Miller at Princeton University. George Miller was an advisory Board member to Simpli.^[1]

Simpli was founded by CEO Jeff Stibel and a number of other professors and graduate students from Brown University, MIT and Princeton University, notably James A. Anderson, Dan Ariely, George A. Miller and Steve Reiss. Stibel is currently the CEO of Web.com and was previously the general manager of United Online. Reiss and Anderson are currently back at Brown University.^[2]

Simpli was sold in 2000 to NetZero.^[3] When NetZero bought the company, they decided to use the technology for targeted advertising and eliminated the search engine. A competitor using similar technology was purchased by Google and they continue to use the technology for search and advertising under adwords.

In 2001, there was a buyout of the company and it was merged with another company called Search123. Most of the original members, including CTO Carl Dunham, rejoined the company, although Stibel remained with NetZero and United Online until he left to become the CEO of Web.com. Stibel did remain actively involved informally and his company, United Online, continued to hold shares in Simpli.

The company was again sold in 2004 to ValueClick. ValueClick re-introduced the search engine in 2005 but without much of the underlying technology. For a good example of what Simpli was doing in search and advertising, look no further than Google AdWords and Yahoo! ContentMatch. ^[4]