I had all but forgotten that AlltheWeb (and by extension Fast) had its origins at my university.
It's unfortunate that it was not more successful. Norway needs more innovative web technology companies; when Fast will completely cease to exist in a few years (it was acquired by Microsoft 3 or so years ago), Opera will be the only notable web technology company remaining.
About once a year I go to AltaVista.com and Lycos.com to see if they still exist. I wonder sometimes if people go to work everyday at these companies, or if they're just a server somewhere now.
How about that! If they are hiring, they must have a plan, a vision, a dream for the company. The question is, what is it? What can they do to get our attention again?
Back in the day, anonymous FTP were a sizable part of the web (especially for good quality source code and scientific data/papers/comment). Some of them stored full backups of the lion's share of USEnet (and still do to this day).
FTPsearch filled a large void, and was blazingly fast compared to other search engines. In these days you waited for 15-20 seconds before the likes of Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista started showing results. Without tabbed browsing, to boot.
A few years ago I emailed Hotbot (owned by Lycos, owned by someone or other) about buying the domain, just out of curiosity of what they would want for it. They never responded. I'm not sure if it's because 1) they don't want to sell, 2) I'm a nobody who couldn't possibly afford it or 3) the page is so outdated the email address I tried is dead.
There are many of these old web properties that are long since dead, but could still be of some value to a startup. It's too bad they were all purchased by companies who don't see that value.
I think Google ultra domination of search have been a minus for search innovation, most of new search service are forced to die in their infancy, no time to put on a fight. Real competition for Google will profit the Internet and us users.
DuckDuckGo has done some good in improve the visibility of the non-search issues related to search. I especially like the focus on privacy as well as the !bang syntax (Try !django us phone field). Plus a simple add-on is all it takes to change your default search provider.
I think innovation on "search" itself has matured enough where you aren't going to see a radical improvement in results. Google become the market leader thanks to crushing competition on quality of results, but that was a decade ago. At this point there isn't enough room to differentiate in the field on results alone, but I don't think that is a symptom of Google's dominance.
Take a look at Bing's flight results. Useful in that I care about prices and dates, not which site I buy a ticket through. Almost Wolfram Alpha style applets inferred from the search terms.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] thread> Understanding of link building and content syndication are required > Bachelors degree in a related field
Did universities start selling SEO(-related) degrees already?
My question still stands though, has anyone heard of a SEO degree, or some kind of online marketing degree (maybe with a SEO class on the curriculum)?
Their TV Listings page is one of the easiest to use and best I've ever seen - merely for its simplicity and amount of information with all the shows:
http://www.excite.com/tv/data.jsp
FTPsearch filled a large void, and was blazingly fast compared to other search engines. In these days you waited for 15-20 seconds before the likes of Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista started showing results. Without tabbed browsing, to boot.
There are many of these old web properties that are long since dead, but could still be of some value to a startup. It's too bad they were all purchased by companies who don't see that value.
I think innovation on "search" itself has matured enough where you aren't going to see a radical improvement in results. Google become the market leader thanks to crushing competition on quality of results, but that was a decade ago. At this point there isn't enough room to differentiate in the field on results alone, but I don't think that is a symptom of Google's dominance.
Take a look at Bing's flight results. Useful in that I care about prices and dates, not which site I buy a ticket through. Almost Wolfram Alpha style applets inferred from the search terms.