Infoseek: shut down by Disney in 2001

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

Infoseek is dead, and has been since 2001

Infoseek does not exist. Its crawler ran for the last time in January 2001, and on 29 January 2001 The Walt Disney Company announced that it would discontinue the operation of its GO.com portal and the search engine within it. That date comes from Disney's own filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is why this page uses it rather than the February 2001 date that circulates elsewhere; where a primary corporate filing and a secondary summary disagree, the filing wins.

The filing puts numbers on the closure. Roughly 400 employees were affected, the majority in Sunnyvale, California — Infoseek's home town. Disney recorded an estimated US$790 million non-cash write-off of intangible assets, plus US$25–50 million in severance and related costs, and converted its Disney Internet Group tracking stock into Disney common stock effective 20 March 2001.

That US$790 million is the most reliable single figure about Infoseek's fate. It is what Disney concluded the acquired internet assets were worth on the way out, stated to a regulator rather than to a journalist.

Checked on 19 August 2026, infoseek.com returns an HTTP 302 redirect to go.com. There is no search box on the destination page.

Infoseek and GO.com are not the same thing

This is the correction most readers need, and it is routinely got wrong. GO.com was a separate Disney portal, not a renamed Infoseek. It launched on 15 January 1999 as a joint venture combining Infoseek's search with Disney's Starwave properties — ESPN.com and ABCNews.com — plus Disney content. Search was one component of a media portal, not the portal itself.

The distinction matters because of what happened next. Disney announced in January 2001 that it would close GO.com, and then did not entirely do so. GO.com survived as a Disney property. What actually and permanently ended was the search engine.

As of 19 August 2026, go.com is a Disney brand directory — links to Parks, Disney+, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, ABC News and ESPN, with a footer reading "© 2026 Disney and its related entities" — and it has no search box anywhere on the page. Disney has held the domain for over a quarter of a century and points it at its own marketing. So a reader typing infoseek.com in 2026 arrives somewhere real, at a live Disney site, and finds nothing to search with. The brand that survived is not the one they were looking for.

There is a second entity that compounds the confusion. Rakuten Infoseek is a Japanese web portal that Rakuten acquired for US$81 million in November 2000 and has operated ever since. It shares a name with the American Infoseek and nothing else. The US engine is dead; a Japanese property with the same word in its title is not the same service and never was.

It had a real crawler, and it was falling behind

Unlike several of its contemporaries that resold or licensed results, Infoseek ran a genuine web crawler and a full-text index (the engine's own stored copy of the web) throughout its independent life and on under Disney until January 2001. This was a real search engine, not a portal with somebody else's results behind the box.

It was, however, an ageing one. Search Engine Watch's assessment of the technology at the point Disney switched it off is blunt and is the fair epitaph: the technology last crawled the web in January 2001, and even then it was dated. Infoseek never developed an answer to link-analysis ranking. While Google was scoring pages by which other pages pointed at them, Infoseek was still doing what the class of 1994 did, and the gap showed in the results.

Two Infoseek product names get conflated constantly and are worth separating:

Ultraseek Server was the enterprise product — Infoseek's engine sold to companies to search their own intranets. It outlived the consumer engine, going to Inktomi in 2000 and on to Verity, Inc. in December 2002.
UltraMatch was something else entirely: a neural-network behavioural ad-targeting system built with Aptex Software, announced in 1996 and shipped the following year.

UltraMatch is Infoseek's most defensible technical first, and it is not a retrieval technology at all. Infoseek is described as the first search engine company to develop and launch behavioural targeting — which makes the ancestor of behaviourally targeted search advertising an Infoseek product rather than a Google one. Whether that is a legacy to celebrate is left to the reader.

One detail research could not establish: the Infoseek robot's user-agent string. No primary documentation of it was located, so this page does not print one.

The experiment that proved people would not pay to search

Infoseek's business history contains one of the most useful experiments in the early commercial web, and it is the reason the page you are reading is free.

Infoseek Corporation was founded in January 1994 in Sunnyvale, California, by Steve Kirsch and others, and it launched that month as a pay-for-use search service: users paid to search the web. It was discontinued in August 1994, after roughly eight months. In February 1995 it relaunched as free, advertising-supported Infoseek search.

Anyone asking when Infoseek launched is asking a question with three answers, and the three-step sequence is the correct one. A single date is always wrong.

The advertising model that replaced the subscription came with a claim attached: that Infoseek was first to sell internet advertising on a CPM basis, cost per thousand impressions, importing the readership-based pricing convention from print publishing. That claim is widely repeated but rests on secondary and company-authored sources, so it belongs on the page as a strong claim rather than an established fact. The broader version sometimes seen — that Infoseek was the first search engine to sell advertising at all — is less well supported still.

A third revenue line, enterprise software licensing through Ultraseek Server, outlived the consumer engine by two years under other owners.

How Disney bought it, in two steps

The single most frequently mis-told fact about Infoseek is that Disney bought it in 1998. Disney bought 43% of it in 1998 and the remainder in July 1999.

The 1998 transaction was not a clean cash purchase either. It was structured around Disney contributing Starwave Corporation — the owner of ESPN.com and ABCNews.com — in exchange for its stake, with cash and warrants also involved. Reported dollar figures for that stake vary and none is reliable, so no headline number appears here. The two companies announced they would jointly build an internet portal, which became GO.com in January 1999.

The full sequence:

January 1994 — founded in Sunnyvale; launches as a paid search service.
August 1994 — the paid service is discontinued.
February 1995 — relaunches free and advertising-supported.
1996 — introduces CPM advertising pricing (claimed first) and announces the UltraMatch partnership with Aptex Software.
June 1996 — IPO on NASDAQ under the ticker SEEK.
January 1998 — acquires WebChat Broadcasting System.
1998 — Disney acquires a 43% stake via the Starwave transaction.
15 January 1999 — GO.com launches, combining Infoseek search with ESPN.com, ABCNews.com and Disney content.
July 1999 — Disney buys the remaining stock; the properties are consolidated into GO.com, around 72% Disney-owned with the balance in a tracking stock.
January 2000 — Disney is forced to abandon GO.com's green-stoplight logo after a complaint by GoTo.com, and a court later orders Disney to pay US$21.5 million in damages.
June 2000 — Ultraseek Server is sold to Inktomi.
November 2000 — Rakuten acquires Infoseek Japan for US$81 million.
January 2001 — the crawler runs for the last time.
29 January 2001 — Disney announces the closure of GO.com and its search engine.

What happened to the search box afterwards

The closure announcement did not empty the search field on GO.com straight away. It emptied it of Infoseek. GO.com kept a search box and stopped using Infoseek technology, serving Overture results soon after the announcement, and in March 2003 Disney announced that GO would be powered by Google. The same reporting notes that Disney had been approached about selling the leftover Infoseek search technology and patents, and declined an offer from a group of former Infoseek and GO employees that would have revived the Infoseek name.

That refusal is the end of the story. There was a moment when Infoseek could have been restarted by the people who had worked on it, and the owner said no.

Meanwhile the Ultraseek enterprise product changed hands once more, going from Inktomi to Verity, Inc. in December 2002 — the last piece of Infoseek technology to be commercially traded.

Why it died, and who should not be citing it

Infoseek was not killed by losing a search-quality contest, though it was losing one. It was killed by being acquired by a media company that wanted an audience funnel, and then written off when the advertising market turned. Disney reframed search as a way to move people towards ABC, ESPN and Disney content; a search engine defined that way is a marketing expense, and marketing expenses get cut in a downturn. The US$790 million write-off in Disney's own filing is the number that tells that story.

Its genuine contributions were commercial rather than algorithmic, and they were real. It ran the experiment that proved users would not pay to search the web in 1994. It ran the experiment that proved advertising would work instead. And it built the first behavioural ad-targeting system deployed on a search engine. What it never built was a ranking method that could compete once link analysis arrived.

Nobody can use Infoseek today. Anyone directed to infoseek.com lands on Disney's corporate homepage. If a directory, listicle or article presents Infoseek as an available search engine — and a surprising number still do — that listing is more than two decades out of date, and the fact that the domain resolves is not evidence to the contrary.

Common misconceptions

"Disney bought Infoseek in 1998." Disney bought 43% in 1998, structured around contributing Starwave rather than paying a simple cash price, and the rest in July 1999.

"Infoseek was renamed GO.com." No. GO.com was a new portal launched on 15 January 1999 that Infoseek was folded into, and it still exists as a Disney landing page while Infoseek does not.

"Infoseek shut down in February 2001." Disney's own SEC filing dates the announcement to 29 January 2001. Some secondary sources say February; prefer the filing.

"Disney shut down GO.com in 2001." Disney announced it would and did not fully carry it out. The search engine ended permanently; the portal did not.

"Infoseek still exists as Rakuten Infoseek." Rakuten Infoseek is a Japanese portal Rakuten bought in November 2000. Same name, different company, different service, different country.

"Ultraseek and UltraMatch are the same product." Ultraseek Server was enterprise search software; UltraMatch was behavioural ad targeting built with Aptex. The names are similar and the products had nothing in common.

"Infoseek was always free." It launched in January 1994 as a paid subscription service and only became free at the February 1995 relaunch.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to Infoseek?

Disney bought it in stages — 43% in 1998, the rest in July 1999 — folded it into the GO.com portal, and announced on 29 January 2001 that it would discontinue GO.com and its search engine. About 400 jobs went, most in Sunnyvale, and Disney recorded an estimated US$790 million write-off of intangible assets. Infoseek's crawler ran for the last time in January 2001.

Is Infoseek still available?

No. As of 19 August 2026, infoseek.com returns a 302 redirect to go.com, which is a Disney brand directory listing Parks, Disney+, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, ABC News and ESPN — with no search box anywhere on the page. The domain resolves, so links to it appear to work, but there is nothing to search. Any listing presenting Infoseek as usable is decades out of date.

Is Infoseek the same as GO.com?

No. GO.com was a separate Disney portal launched on 15 January 1999, combining Infoseek's search with ESPN.com, ABCNews.com and other Disney content. Infoseek was folded into it as one component. Disney announced GO.com's closure in 2001 but did not fully carry it out: the portal survives as a Disney landing page, while the search engine ended permanently.

Did Infoseek have its own search index?

Yes. Infoseek ran a genuine web crawler and full-text index throughout its independent life and under Disney until January 2001, which distinguishes it from portals of the era that resold other engines' results. The technology was ageing by the end — Search Engine Watch called it dated at the point it stopped running — and Infoseek never developed a link-analysis answer to PageRank.

When did Infoseek launch?

There are three answers because three things happened. Infoseek Corporation was founded in January 1994 in Sunnyvale, California, by Steve Kirsch and others, launching that month as a pay-for-use subscription search service. That paid service was discontinued in August 1994. It relaunched in February 1995 as free, advertising-supported search. Any single launch date omits two of those events.

Is Rakuten Infoseek the same company?

No. Rakuten acquired Infoseek Japan in November 2000 for US$81 million and has operated it as a Japanese web portal ever since. It shares the name and nothing else with the American Infoseek engine that Disney shut down in 2001. The two are separate businesses in separate jurisdictions, and treating the Japanese portal as proof that Infoseek survived is a mistake.

What was UltraMatch?

A neural-network behavioural ad-targeting system Infoseek developed with Aptex Software, announced in 1996 and shipped the following year. Infoseek is described as the first search engine company to develop and launch behavioural targeting, which makes the ancestor of behaviourally targeted search advertising an Infoseek product. It should not be confused with Ultraseek Server, which was a separate enterprise search product.

Could Infoseek ever come back?

It was offered the chance and refused. Reporting from March 2003 records that Disney's internet group had been approached about the leftover Infoseek search technology and patents, and declined an offer from a group of former Infoseek and GO employees that would have revived the name. Disney retains both infoseek.com and go.com and uses them for its own marketing.

Infoseek