March 10 2001, updated March 15.

GoTo replaces Infoseek at Go

In 1999 the pay-per-click search engine GoTo sued Disney's Go company for copyright infringment, and won. Go had to change its logo to a version that did not look that similar to the GoTo trademark. In a surprising twist of events, GoTo has now replaced Infoseek as the search engine of the Go portal.

What makes this even more peculiar, is the fact that Disney announced that it would close the Go portal by the end of February. In one way, they have, as this new Go site looks nothing like the old extensive portal. This is more like a one page gateway to other Disney sites, like ABC, ESPN and Disney.com.

It makes perfectly sense, however. Instead of closing the go.com domain altogether, and loosing a lot of loyal followers, they keep a page that is cheap and easy to update, hopefully leading some of the visitors to other parts of the Disney empire.

The Infoseek search engine is no more. It has been replaced by GoTo. As our regular readers will know, this is a pay-per-click search engine, where companies pay to get a good position in the results. All listings are controlled by GoTo's editorial staff, which means that the search results may perfectly well be relevant. We would not recommend anyone using GoTo as their primary search engine though.

If GoTo cannot find relevant results in its own database, it will fetch results from the Inktomi search engine.

Update:

According to CNET News.com 25 former employees of Go.com is trying to buy the Infoseek search engine, in order to resurrect it as a separate search site. The idea is to buy the Infoseek service mark, the infoseek.com domain name and some servers.

• Go
• GoTo
• The second coming of Infoseek? (News.com)

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