The brand associated with the commercialization of pay-per-click search has found its way back to the internet.
How’s this for a bit of nostalgia?
Remember GoTo.com and its iconic green and yellow logo? It’s baaaack!
If you weren’t around the domain and online advertising world in the late 90s, you might not be familiar with the site. GoTo.com basically invented the pay-per-click search marketing business that is the basis for Google’s search ads and became key to the domain parking business.
The company later changed its name to Overture, and ultimately was acquired by Yahoo.
For a long time after Yahoo’s acquisition, the GoTo.com domain was owned by Go2 Directory Systems. xAd acquired the assets of Go2 a couple years ago. Now if you go to the domain name you’ll see this:
This new site apparently went live last month.
The only thing that looks different is that one of the top searches is the iPad Air – something that certainly wasn’t around in 1999!
The about page for the new site reads:
Once, there was a search engine that invented a new way to connect consumers and businesses. It was called GoTo.com. Recently, the goto.com domain became available and a few of us who were there in the early days decided to purchase it. We’ve got lots of ideas for what to do with goto.com but in the meantime, we thought it would be fun to resurrect goto.com as a search engine. Hats off to the GoTo.com team that helped revolutionize search. We hope you enjoy searching on today’s site. Please leave a comment below or on our Facebook page and let us know what you think.
The domain’s whois record is currently protected by whois privacy. But it may be that xAd still owns it, as two of its executives have roots in Yahoo! Search Marketing/Overture.
Wow. That brings back memories. I met them at a Boston trade show in like 1999 and immediately knew they had a great idea.
Talk about being nostalgic. I hope and wish that the people that were involved in the domain name back then are associated with this reincarnation. They had a vision and implemented it with success. You can sell an idea to a person or company but if they don’t have an aligned vision for it, it’s bound to miss a mark.
It is a welcome site. (No pun intended).
******** G R E A T !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *****************
FIGHT GOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YES, YOU CAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!
EVERYONE CAN NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TYPE-IN IS MORE POWERFUL THAN GOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
GOGOGOOOOO….GOTO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“TYPE-IN IS MORE POWERFUL THAN GOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ”
of course this means: go and put in your search engine only good sites exploiting generic domains
GOGOOGOOOGOOOOOO…..GOTO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Am I the only who is directed to the Yahoo site when I type goto.com?
Strange. Not just you. Must have started sometime this afternoon.
Update: I heard from GoTo.com and they said they’re doing maintenance, so they forwarded the domain to Yahoo.com while they were doing it. It’s back online.
You left out they stopped using goto.com because Disney threatened them because they had go.com.
Actually Domain Ex, they stopped using goto.com because they moved the operation to Yahoo.com after Yahoo bought Overture; which started at goto.com.
And it was actually goto who filed a trademark infringement suit against — and got a big settlement from — Disney:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/26/business/disney-and-gotocom-settle-logo-suit.html
I hope the bring back the 3 cent per search affiliate program : ))
GoTo recently re-launched their search engine. Check it out.