The second coming of Infoseek?

[luckynh]

Search engine Infoseek, which Walt Disney acquired and refurbished into its ill-fated Go.com Web portal, may not be dead after all.
read more [news.cnet.com]

[WebRookie]

Wouldn't it be great if they could pull it off. Let's hope so, having Infoseek back to where it was would be terrific.

[mivox]

If they can pull it off, maybe other internet companies will take notes on that crazy "keeping overhead low" idea these guys have... it could revolutionize the web! ;)

[JamesR]

They still need a revenue generating model which is the hard part. They can't do it by banner ads well, Goto.com skews search results, and pay for play will only work if you can get a lot of people to your site. Infoseek will only do well if their technology can match Google's as G has raised the bar considerably. The cost of servers, spidering, ongoing research, and the brain power to run a good search engine really drives up the cost. I don't know how they can make it, loyal followers will only last so long if they can find what they are looking for a lot faster somewhere else.

[WebRookie]

The thing that came to mind for me that might make a difference for this group is support from SEO's. If they were to maintain free submission I'd hope SEO's, small businesses and non-commercial sites would use their services.

There's a point when some of us can't afford to pay to list all our sites. A choice of free submission might come in handy down the road.

[WebGuerrilla]

I think they are sitting on a potential gold mine. They have all the components to combine the best revenue streams of all the major players. The GO directory is certainly large enough and of good enough quality to compete with LookSmart in a relatively short period of time. And if the dust off Sidewinder, they could could also become a strond competitor to Ink and Fast.

The key is that they need to focus on being more of a backend provider than trying to become a stand alone search engine.

It certainly won't be the same IS of a couple years ago, but a company that could provide both a spider database and a human reviewed database that offers revenue sharing components to partners could do quite well.

[luckynh]

>support from SEO's.

This would be a great benifet for both SEO's and Infoseek.
There is a big following for infoseek with the SEO's, as we have seen from the response on this board
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I believe that having a great spider and a quick updated database while taking into the "human powered" directory they can really excel in the SE world.

If they were to build a SE that could provide back-end results for others (i.e. Inktomi and MSN, HotBot,DirectHit...) They would have a great stand on the market.

It takes a lot of $$$ to run a SE but if they planned it right they could make a great come back.

I miss that days of submitting a page and getting referrals from it a few days later. Now if they can just bring back the good ole' days then it would become even more popular with the SEO's and our clients.

There's nothing better than seeing the results of your work as soon as possible.

[mayor]

Infoseek/Go was a top search engine as far as I'm concerned. It amazed me that Disney decided to trash it. Just goes to show that giant corporations often have more money than brains.

[JamesR]

>The GO directory is certainly large enough and of good enough quality to compete with LookSmart in a relatively short period of time.

Can the Go directory legally profit off of volunteer efforts? I thought that was a no no back in first reading about the ODP going big.

[Billythekid]

>Can the Go directory legally profit off of volunteer efforts? I thought that was a no no back in first <

My uppdated agreement as a Go. guide (past tense..sob..) did state that the database could be used for any use the company (Disney) saw fit and was resellable. I remember at the time wondering why they bothered as I figured the data was being sold anyway. Oh well.

[backus]

hmmm...I'll believe it when I see it. But if they do pull it off, then I believe that WmW, SeW etc should back it and make Infoseek the Real search engine it always was in the past!!!

[Brett_Tabke]

There hasn't been any other info available about this has there? The only story I've seen is the cnet article.