Infoseek

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Infoseek Corporation arrived from Sunnyvale, California, in January 1994, founded by Steve Kirsch during the web’s gloriously unorganized adolescence. Its first idea was pay-for-use searching—because apparently the future briefly considered putting a tollbooth in front of curiosity. That model was dropped in August 1994; Infoseek returned as a free, advertising-supported search service in February 1995.

The bright-yellow search engine became one of the era’s familiar routes into the rapidly expanding web. A 1995 arrangement made it Netscape Navigator’s default search provider, and Infoseek went public on Nasdaq as SEEK on June 11, 1996. Alongside consumer web search, it developed Ultraseek, a search product for corporate sites and intranets.

Disney acquired about 43 percent of Infoseek in 1998, exchanging Starwave and cash as the companies assembled a broader online portal strategy. Infoseek search, Disney material, and Starwave properties including ESPN.com and ABCNews.com fed the Go Network, launched in January 1999.

In November 1999, shareholders approved Disney’s acquisition of the remaining Infoseek shares and the business was folded into Go.com. Disney announced the end of the Go.com portal operation in January 2001; the portal business closed on March 1. Ultraseek had already been sold to Inktomi in 2000, proving that even vanished web empires sometimes leave a useful server rack behind.

Our Infoseek collection celebrates the sunny, yellow, pre-algorithm-overlord internet: a time when finding anything online felt like exploration, and a search box could look like a destination.