Infoseek

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Infoseek was a very popular search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch, et al. By September 1997 it boasted 7.3 million visitors per month ^[1]. It was bought by Disney in 1998, and the technology was merged with that of the Disney-acquired Starwave to form the Go.com network. Since then it has been replaced with Yahoo! search and is no longer in use.

Infoseek featured a very complex system of search modifiers, including boolean modifiers such as the most basic "OR" and "NOT", parentheses, and quotes, up to being able to say that you want one word or phrase to appear within x number of words from another word or phrase. Infoseek was also known as "big yellow".

Before being bought by Disney, Infoseek also offered a free webhosting package that was better than many of today's offerings. It was free of advertising, and had apparently no limits on the amount of webspace that could be used. After being purchased by Disney and converted to the Go Network (and then Go.com because of trademark disputes with competitor, Goto.com), large, cumbersome ads started appearing on every page hosted. In February 2001, Disney made the decision to cancel the service and lay off the entire staff. Eventually, the webhosting service disappeared entirely, virtually overnight, with little or no warning.

In 2001 Bernt Wahl, Andy Bensky and 15 software engineers -- Infoseek employees -- led a management buyout attempt from Disney.

Infoseek's Ultraseek Server software technology, an enterprise search engine product, was sold in 2000 to Inktomi. Under Inktomi, Ultraseek Server was renamed "Inktomi Enterprise Search". In December 2002 (prior to Yahoo's acquisition of Inktomi), the Ultraseek product suite was sold to a competitor Verity Inc, who re-established the Ultraseek brand name and continued development of the product.

In December 2005, Verity was acquired by UK company Autonomy PLC. Under Autonomy, Ultraseek continues to be actively developed and marketed as Autonomy's entry-level keyword-based site search offering.

Today, "infoseek.com" now forwards to the "go.com" website. The brand name of Infoseek is now completely unused in North America, however Infoseek Japan still operates.