InfoSpace
Dot-com era metasearch company (Dogpile, WebCrawler) whose search business System1 bought for $45 million in 2016.
Bellevue, Washington, USA · founded 1996 · system1.com
What InfoSpace does
InfoSpace was founded in 1996 by Naveen Jain, a former Microsoft employee, and at the peak of the dot-com boom was valued at about $31 billion. Its lasting business was metasearch: sites such as Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler that fetch results and ads from the big search engines and present them together. It also supplied private-label search to other websites.
A metasearch engine earns its money from syndicated search ads, so InfoSpace was a feed business in all but name, with long-running Google and Yahoo agreements.
The parent company renamed itself Blucora in 2012 after moving into tax software. In 2016 it sold InfoSpace to OpenMail, the company that became System1, for $45 million in cash. The deal closed on 10 August 2016, and the brands remain part of System1.
How it makes money
A share of the search-ad revenue from sponsored results on its metasearch sites and on partner sites using its search.
Products
- Dogpile
- WebCrawler
- MetaCrawler
- Info.com
- Private-label search