Do you want to own the trademark and domain name of a former search engine? Well, here is your chance.
The trademark and domain name of Infoseek, a search engine originally founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch and the first search engine to sell advertising on a CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) basis, will be put up for auction on December 8, 2010. The Infoseek trademark and domain name will be part of a brand name auction being held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City.
Currently, Infoseek.com redirects to Go.com, a web portal powered by Yahoo! Search (which is powered by Bing.com).
According to Wikipedia, the Infoseek search engine originally featured a “complex system of search modifiers, including boolean modifiers such as the most basic “OR” and “NOT”, parentheses, and quotes, up to being able to say that one wanted one word or phrase to appear within x number of words from another word or phrase.
Before being bought by Disney, Infoseek also offered a free web hosting package. It was free of advertising, and had no limit on the amount of file storage space that could be used. Advertising was added after the Disney purchase.”
In September of 1997, Infoseek had about 7.3 million visitors per month. Infoseek was bought by The Walt Disney Company in 1998, and Infoseek’s technology was merged with Starwave, another technology and company that Disney bought, to eventually form the Go.com network.
In December, the Infoseek trademark and domain name will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Certainly this is a great opportunity for someone to acquire not only part of internet search engine history, but possibly revive the search engine. Personally, I would love to see another great competitor out there to compete with Google and Bing.com.
To register for the Infoseek auction and see the other brands and trademarks that are being auctioned, see http://www.trademarkauctioninfo.com.