The final end for the NBCi/Snap directory

August 21 2001

NBC has relaunched the NBCi site with a new look. The new makeup does not hide the fact that this means the end for the old Snap directory.

On the new NBCi site the search form fetches results from the Dogpile metasearch engine. The search engine is actually hosted on Dogpile servers, meaning that NBCi has -- for all practical purposes -- become a gateway other sites.

Even if NBC had originally decided to close the NBCi site, this actually makes sense. This is the same tactic as applied by Disney when they gave up on the Go portal.

Instead of closing Go completely, Disney decided to get the most out of their large number of visitors, leading them to other Disney sites, and harvesting revenue by serving them paid search engine results from the GoTo pay-per-click search engine.

NBCi/Dogpile also rely heavily on results from pay-per-click search engines. Search Engine Watch recently found that as many as 60 percent of Dogpile search results were paid results.

The first page of results presented by "nbci.dogpile.com" is fetched from GoTo (paid results or ads), LookSmart ("featured" or paid listings), FindWhat (ditto) and Sprinks (again paid listings).

The NBCi directory, previously known as Snap, is nowhere to be seen. The "web directory" links bring you to Infospace, which is something else alltogether.

The NBCi version of Infospace has a search form that lets you select to get results from LookSmart, the Open Directory, Direct Hit, GoTo/Inktomi or the one-man search engine Search Hippo (as presented in the latest issue of the Pandia Post newsletter). The results are served by Infoseek on pages carrying the NBCi design. This search form is not available on the NBCi front page, however.

All this means that NBCi no longer be can considered a serious search site. Search engine optimizers have one less search directory to be worry about. A pity really, we actually liked the old Snap directory.

NBCi