Netbot

Last updated

Netbot was the first commercial Internet price comparison service. [1] Founded by University of Washington Computer Science professors Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld the company was funded by ARCH Venture Partners, Alta Partners and the Madrona Venture Group, and the University of Washington was also a shareholder. [2] Netbot introduced the Jango comparison shopping “agent” first as a browser plug-in and later, as a server product. [3] [4] In addition, the company operated MetaCrawler, a metasearch engine, before licensing it to Go2Net. In October 1997, Netbot was acquired by the Excite portal for $35M. [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lycos</span> Search engine and web portal

Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is a subsidiary of Ybrant Digital.

WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Excite (web portal)</span> Internet portal

Excite is an American website operated by IAC that provides outsourced internet content such as a metasearch engine, with outsourced weather and news content on the main page. As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.

Verio is a global web hosting provider headquartered in the United States. Incorporated in 1996 in Denver, Colorado, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Communications, which acquired the company in 2000. Verio was formed from a consolidation of over 200 smaller Internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosting services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Online shopping</span> Form of electronic commerce

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tripod (web hosting)</span> Web hosting service

Tripod.com is a web hosting service owned by Lycos. Originally aiming its services to college students and young adults, it was one of several sites trying to build online communities during the 1990s. As such, Tripod formed part of the first wave of user-generated content. Free webpages are no longer available and have been replaced by paid services.

@Home Network was a high-speed cable Internet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through two-way television cable infrastructure. At the company's peak it provided high speed Internet service for 4.1 million subscribers in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Benelux nations. The company operated as four joint ventures, three of which were international. In 1999, the company acquired Excite. In 2008, @Home was merged into Ziggo.

A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements. In the United Kingdom, these services made between £780m and £950m in revenue in 2005. Hence, E-commerce accounted for an 18.2 percent share of total business turnover in the United Kingdom in 2012. Online sales already account for 13% of the total UK economy, and its expected to increase to 15% by 2017. There is a huge contribution of comparison shopping websites in the expansion of the current E-commerce industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Kraus</span> American entrepreneur

Joe Kraus is the founder of Excite, JotSpot, and DigitalConsumer.org, along with his long-time business partner Graham Spencer. Currently, Kraus is an Investment Partner on the GV team and President at Lime.

Jellyfish.com was a reverse auction online shopping website. The Middleton, Wisconsin-based company was acquired by Microsoft in 2007. On May 22, 2008, Microsoft officially announced the cash back service as part of their Live Search group of tools. The site was shut down at midnight, February 16, 2009.

Yahoo! Australia is the Australian subsidiary of global internet company Yahoo! Originally a 50/50 joint venture between Yahoo! and Seven West Media, it has been a 100% subsidiary of Verizon Media since March 2018. Yahoo! is a web portal, providing email, online news and lifestyle content, as well as weather, travel and retail comparison services.

Brightmail Inc. was a San Francisco–based technology company focused on anti-spam filtering. Brightmail's system has a three-pronged approach to stopping spam, the Probe Network is a massive number of e-mail addresses established for the sole purpose of receiving spam. The Brightmail Logistics and Operations Center (BLOC) evaluates newly detected spam and issues rules for ISPs. The third approach is the Spam Wall, a filtering engine that identifies and screens out spam based on the updates from the BLOC.

Like.com was a price comparison service website that billed itself as a "visual search engine for products".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blue Coat Systems</span> American cybersecurity and network management company

Blue Coat Systems, Inc., was a company that provided hardware, software, and services designed for cybersecurity and network management. In 2016, it was acquired by and folded into Symantec. In 2019 was, as part of Symantec Enterprise division, sold to Broadcom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fab (website)</span> American e-commerce company (2010-)

Fab is an e-commerce company founded in 2010. Once estimated at a worth of over $1 billion, in March 2015, the digital and ecommerce assets of Fab were acquired by PCH International for an undisclosed sum and has since been relaunched as a new entity with no interaction from the original founders.

MetaCrawler is a search engine. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace and was created by Erik Selberg.

Mindspark Interactive Network, Inc. was an operating business unit of IAC known for the development and marketing of entertainment and personal computing software, as well as mobile application development. Mindspark's mobile division acquired iOS application developer Apalon in 2014, which was known for popular entertainment applications such as Weather Live, Emoji Keypad, and Calculator Pro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oren Etzioni</span> American computer scientist and entrepreneur

Oren Etzioni is an American entrepreneur, Professor Emeritus of computer science, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). On June 15, 2022, he announced that he will step down as CEO of AI2 effective September 30, 2022. After that time, he will continue as a board member and advisor. Etzioni will also take the position of Technical Director of the AI2 Incubator.

iPrice Group

iPrice Group Sdn Bhd is a privately owned online shopping aggregator based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The company is an online aggregator that simplifies a consumers shopping experience by allowing them to browse for products and compare prices from various online stores. iPrice is a funding and investment product of Asia Venture Group and currently operates in eight Asian countries; namely Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Australia. As of May 2017, iPrice hosts a catalogue of over 110 million products from over 1000 merchants across the region, including big e-commerce sites like Lazada and Zalora.

Forcepoint is an American multinational corporation software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that develops computer security software and data protection, cloud access security broker, firewall and cross-domain solutions.

References