MetaCrawler was a game-changer when it launched in 1995. It didn’t just deliver search results from a single source—it combined results from all the big names at the time, giving users the ultimate search experience. But like many early internet innovators, it faced challenges that eventually led to its downfall. Let’s take a journey through the history of this once-revolutionary search engine.
Back in 1995, Eric Selberg, a computer science grad student at the University of Washington, had a clever idea. Why settle for results from one search engine when you could get them from all of them? And just like that, MetaCrawler was born.
Instead of relying on a single search platform like AltaVista or Yahoo!, MetaCrawler scoured multiple search engines at once. Imagine asking a room full of people for their opinion on something and getting a list of the most relevant responses. That was the genius behind MetaCrawler.
Two years after MetaCrawler's launch, Go2Net, a web services company, saw the potential and snapped it up. This acquisition allowed MetaCrawler to grow and become even more user-friendly. With Go2Net’s backing, MetaCrawler expanded its features, making it easier for people to find what they were looking for.
But Go2Net wasn’t the only one with its eyes on this new technology.
In 1999, InfoSpace, a major player in online search and mobile tech, bought Go2Net for a whopping $4 billion. With this purchase, InfoSpace acquired MetaCrawler too, bringing it into a much larger digital ecosystem. It was an exciting time for the search engine.
MetaCrawler was now part of a massive network, and things looked promising. However, the early 2000s had other plans for the once-popular search tool.
As the new millennium rolled in, Google started dominating the search engine space. With its powerful algorithms and simpler design, Google quickly became the go-to platform for anyone searching the web. MetaCrawler, despite its meta-search capabilities, struggled to keep up.
During this period, the appeal of meta search engines waned. People wanted quick, relevant results from a single search engine rather than a collection of them. MetaCrawler’s unique selling point became less important, and its user base began to shrink.
To stay afloat, InfoSpace made a move in 2005. They merged MetaCrawler with Dogpile, another search engine under their umbrella. Although the two engines still existed independently, their technology and resources were combined to create a more streamlined experience for users.
But even this wasn’t enough to bring back the glory days. The writing was on the wall.
By the late 2000s, MetaCrawler was becoming more of a niche tool. While it still had loyal users, most people had moved on to the likes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo! The internet landscape had changed, and MetaCrawler struggled to find a new place in it.
Finally, in 2021, MetaCrawler was officially shut down. Its features were folded into other properties under the System1 and InfoSpace umbrella, marking the end of an era for the once-pioneering search engine.
Even though MetaCrawler is no longer around, its legacy lives on. MetaCrawler introduced the idea of meta search, a concept that laid the groundwork for how we aggregate and prioritize information today.
It reminds us of how quickly technology can evolve. The features that made MetaCrawler popular in the 1990s seem outdated by today’s standards, but at the time, it was revolutionary.
Would search engines today be as efficient without pioneers like MetaCrawler laying the groundwork? It's something to think about as we look to the future of web search.
Curious about how the biggest names in search engines started? Here’s another one. The Rise and Fall of Clusty: The Metasearch Engine That Pioneered Clustering