Infoseek

By the end of this, you'll be able to spot it in four questions.

This is SEO fucking what? I'm Nikki, and I've been doing this for over 30 years, back before it was called SEO, back when we were optimizing for AltaVista and Infoseek.

I help small business owners actually make money from their websites by getting found in search.

Now, most weeks on this show, I take one specific piece of nonsense and I kick it to death.

Wait, turned down by who?

Three of the biggest names of that entire era: Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, the companies that basically were the front page of the internet at the time.

All three looked at the actual search technology and passed because their whole strategy was becoming a portal, get you to land on their homepage and stay there, clicking around news and email and horoscopes, not send you somewhere else as fast as possible with the right answer.

A great search engine was, in their own business logic, actively bad for a portal.

Okay, just barely.

InfoSeek, Yahoo, something.

They

could have done AOL.

It's picking which specific company is going to win while you're standing inside the bubble.

If you cast your mind back to the late 90s and you're convinced the internet is the future and you're right about that and you started looking for a company that will own internet search, The obvious choice at the time might have been Infoseek or Lycos or AltaVista or Excite, the biggest, best-funded search leaders that had become household names.

Every one of them is now a trivia question.

The company that eventually won, Google, barely existed during the bubble and only came to prominence in the early 2000s, after the bubble had burst.

This is-- I appreciate you introducing that way.

I call myself a recovering SEO sometimes, because that was my entrée into the marketing world, is through search, optimizing webpages for HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek.

You remember those names?

Yeah, yeah.

It's picking which specific company is going to win while you're standing inside the bubble.

If you cast your mind back to the late '90s and you're convinced the internet is the future, and you're right about that, and you started looking for a company that will own internet search, the obvious choice at the time might have been Infoseek, or Lycos, or AltaVista, or Excite, the biggest, best-funded search leaders that had become household names.

Every one of them is now a trivia question.

The company that eventually won, Google, barely existed during the bubble and only came to prominence in the early 2000s after the bubble had burst.

Well, it, but it...

And you know what was happening? When you typed in astrology, it would send you to Infoseek, which was like Yahoo or-

Yeah

...

They were telling people about it on hot news and hyperlinking over to me.

I couldn't believe it.

And I kept telling them, "I'm trying to help you, and you keep getting it backwards." So they, at that dinner, they wanted to know how the meeting went, and I, I said, "No, it didn't work out the way I thought," and, and they recommended I see Infoseek, that people who had worked for Apple were there in Sunnyvale, and could I go tomorrow? And I said, "Sure." I don't even know how to drive, but I stay in good hotels [laughs] where the concierge figures things out.

But they have Caltrain in San Francisco.