Web Masters
Aaron Dinin
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Steve Kirsch @ Infoseek: The Entrepreneur Who Wanted to Charge for Web Search
Considering one of the most valuable companies in the world -- Google --- makes a majority of its money from web search, it’s hard to imagine a world in which startups struggled to make money from search engines. But that’s actually how the world was in the early days of the Web. Back in the mid-1990s, most search engines were being run as experiments out of either universities (e.g. Lycos at Carnegie Mellon) or companies (e.g. AltaVista at Digital Equipment Corporation). As a result, search engines didn’t need to be profitable, and that was a good thing because they were expensive to operate and nobody could figure out a viable business model. The biggest exception to this was Steve Kirsch’s Infoseek. Infoseek wasn’t an experiment. Instead, Infoseek was the search engine that was launched as a business from Day 1. And, like any business, someone needed to pay. In the minds of Steve and his co-founders, the most obvious people to charge were the people they were directly giving value to: the ones using Infoseek to perform searches. As a result, in the earliest days of Infoseek, the company charged users for each search they performed. Can you imagine that? How different would the world be if every search we performed online cost us money? We'll explore that, and more, on this episode of Web Masters in a conversation with Infoseek founder and well-known serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch. For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.
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