Forum Moderators: bakedjake
"Lookee here, we gotta make a profit in the first quarter or the mouse goes!"
-G
Let me translate that quote into WebmasterWorldspeak....
GO.com, put your head between your knees and kiss your butt goodbye.
So they finally realized that throwing so much garbage in portal form just doesn't work that well. Everyone goes straight to the search box. They should have learned from Altavista's mistakes when they dumped so much effort into their portal.
Edited by: msgraph
This is what happens when you have a CEO and staff who is not internet-savvy. While Mr. Eisner is very good at what he does, he does not do the Internet and doesn't understand the nuances of marketing on the web.
The same happened to bluelight.com (K-Mart): They had a headstart, having beat Walmart and Target into the online market, but showed stupendous lack of foresight when they said, "We aren't going to focus on the online presence or the search engines." What a shame. :(
They are, however, in good company. The well-touted CEO of GE did something similar in 1993 when they had an online service called GEnie. Prodigy led the market, then GEnie, followed by an also-ran called "AOL." GE closed GEnie, saying that they would rather focus on their money-making properties.
"M-I-C -- C ya real soon"
"K-E-Y -- Why? Because we're clueless!"
"M-O-U-S-E" :)
Edited by: Laisha
I remember a while ago (couple years) when my ex-husband suggested doing a pay-for-preferred-ranking site to me. "Build a big directory, promote it like hell, and then offer people better listings for $$"
"That's stupid," I said, "nobody's going to PAY for a search engine/directory listing when they can get them for free!"
Lack of foresight is a common trait in humans.
Trying to create a portal based on house brands and advertising is problematic at best. Any search for Entertainment topics results in huge ads for Mr Showbiz. Ditto for Sports and ESPN. What ads would GO.com be willing to sell to independent entertainment or sports sites, and who would buy ads there given the range of other choices?
[msnbc.com...]
Will they just close and let it die?
What happens to the Go Guides and the work they have put in?
Will anyone admit to paying the $199 for "express spidering"?
They didn't get much time to put their head between their knees, did they?
-G
If even in a firesale, it seems that it would have made more sense to sell it to someone else. But I guess when you have the kind of money that Disney does - you can do just about anything you want.
-G
*sniff*
I loved Infoseek in it's big days of 97...man what an engine.
Well, I signed up a while ago, just to submit my own sites. It all seemed a bit to commercial for my tastes, so I didn't personally put much time into it. Who knows, maybe DMOZ will have an influx of new volunteers?
Sad, my company site is #1 in a few categories at Go, and we've gotten consistent traffic from them. I knew things were going downhill though, when they debuted the "new look" and took the directory drill-down menu off the front page. What's the point of maintaining a directory, if NONE of your site visitors can find the interface for it?
I've opened a Go Guide Refugee Camp down in FOO, somewhere they can get some shelter and a decent post.
Hrm... maybe Disney should recast itself as an online board game company. They could buy the Internet Go Server and move it to the go.com domain.
Heck, I clicked on it before anything else. Saw there was a hyoperlink to a fourm and jumped straight in.
Darn...I was just pulling a mivox and submitting my own sites and getting good rankings in the GO directory!
I just looked through my referrer logs, and found that Go.com was running a VERY close second to Yahoo... *snif*
