The Norwegian media company Schibsted has decided to close down its Sesam search site.

Sesam was launched in 2005 as a Nordic competitor to Google, with both Norwegian and Swedish sites.

It was originally a regular web search engine powered by Fast.

Last year, however, Schibsted realized that there was no way they could compete with Google in this field, and they turned Sesam into a yellow pages kind of search tool focusing on company, people and map search.

It is clear that the Norwegian version of Sesam will be closed down, but most likely also the Swedish version

100 of 110 Norwegian Sesam employees will lose their job, most of them getting severance packages in the process.

The search functionality of Sesam will now be included in the Norwegian equialent of Craigslist: Finn.no. In many ways this is more a matter of focusing the marketing on one brand in Norway (Finn) and — probably — Blocket.se in Sweden.

The reasons for Sesam’s failiure

Sesam failed for several reasons. Branding is important. Google has a very strong position in the Nordic area, and Sesam could not deliver better search results.

Sesam did not manage to develop its own pay per click ad system, which is — of course — what makes Google so profitable.

According to Dagens IT, Sesam now has some 150,000 visitors a day, which is a very low number, even for a nation of 4.7 million inhabitants.

Schibsted as a whole has lost somewhere between 1.6 and 2 billion Norwegian kroner as a result of the financial crisis (0.3 billion US$).

This does not mean the end of Schibsted’s Internet and search adventures, however.

The newspaper company was one of the first media companies to understand the threats and opportunities that came with the world wide web. Now some 90 percent of the result comes from online activities, including search.

Here are some of the search sites Schibsted owns in Europe:

Hitta.se (map search) Sweden
Blocket (classifieds) Sweden
Finn.no (classifieds) Norway
Leboncoin (classifieds) France
Infojobs (jobs) Spain
Willhaben (classifieds) Austria
Kapaza! (classifieds) Belgium

There are also Schibsted sites for classified ads in South and Central America, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, and most of them are powered by the same software as Finn.no.

See also:
The hidden search engine industry: Sesam adds 3D images and street view (Pandia)
Sesam i Sverige mot slutten NA24
VG Netts søkemotor legges ned VG
Ikke overrasket over Sesam-slutt (Aftenposten/E24)
Sesam – en trippel fiasko Dagens IT