Giants of the Internet

The internet means different things to different people, with so much information and functionality available within a click of a mouse going online is an addictive experience. If you were to timeline its evolution you could mark it with major site launches. These sites changed the way we communicate, have fun and shop.

Big game changers such as Yahoo!, Google, Myspace and Facebook are obvious choices and rightly so. But what about some lesser known names that have also had a big impact, but not survived the onslaught of the new kids on the block?

Before Google and Bing there was Infoseek. It was one of the first search engines and at one point had around 7.5 million users per month, which is pretty huge for the 90s. Steve Kirsch founded it in 1994 and it was eventually sold to Disney in 1998. One interesting titbit is that Infoseek was one of the first companies to use behavioural targeting advertising 1997. If you don’t know what that is, it basically matches a user’s interests with relevant ads. It’s still operating in some small capacity but nothing like it was. In fact an Infoseek engineer by the name of Li Yanhong left the company and went on co-found Baidu.

Google is a behemoth in the world of tech, a name synonymous with innovation and creativity. But with all this going on for every success it has had there are bound to be a couple of failures here and there. Does anyone remember Google Answers? No, I thought not. You know how Yahoo! Answers works. You go on post a question and within a few minutes you usually get an answer back from another user. Well, Google did it a little differently they had around 500 researchers ready to find your answer within 24 hours for only $2.50. This is probably the reason why it didn’t catch on.

Geocities used to be huge now it’s a mere distant memory in a world that is so fast paced it’s almost impossible to keep up. It was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner as Beverly Hills Internet in 1994 and used to provide free web hosting which everyone naturally wanted when the internet became big.

It was a novel concept people picked what site they wanted and were placed in a “Internet City”. For example if it was an entertainment site it would be placed in Hollywood. Unfortunately in 2009 and after it was acquired by Yahoo! Acquired it in 1999 for $3.5 billion it stopped accepting new registrations and closed down its US operations.

New innovative sites are popping up all the time and who knows in the next 10 years we could be talking about the crash of Google or even Facebook.