GoTo.com, every mention
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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 12David Rosenthal 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where GoTo.com comes up
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:51:21 Ben Gilbert There was an innovator in the space called Overture, or its original name, GoTo.com.
- ▶ 1:51:29 Ben Gilbert So, GoTo.
- ▶ 1:53:29 Ben Gilbert So Bill went so far as to, uh, GoTo didn't actually develop any organic search technology on their own.
- ▶ 1:54:04 Ben Gilbert When you searched, GoTo would show you a list of the paid results exactly in order of who paid the most with no fanciness at all beyond that.
- ▶ 1:54:47 Ben Gilbert And so go to advertisers only had to pay when a user actually clicked.
- ▶ 1:56:05 Ben Gilbert Goto did a hundred million in revenue in one year.
- ▶ 1:56:57 Ben Gilbert GoTo goes public within a year.
- ▶ 1:58:12 David Rosenthal But the internet was still enough of sort of a utopian, uh, community, like small enough and sort of an outgrowth of academia that, I mean, people booed Bill Gross and, go to on stage at TED in 1998.
- ▶ 1:59:36 Ben Gilbert In Google's case, they label them even less than Bill was labeling them at GoTo, and then it's followed by the organic results after that.
- ▶ 2:00:06 David Rosenthal And then he and Goto and Overture set the example of like, oh, oh, this is how you're gonna monetize search.
- ▶ 2:00:44 Ben Gilbert So just like Google started doing organic portal deals, GoTo starts doing paid portal deals.
- ▶ 2:00:54 Ben Gilbert This is when they switch from GoTo to Overture.
- ▶ 2:02:13 Ben Gilbert Did you know that GoTo tried to acquire Google?
- ▶ 2:02:33 Ben Gilbert And Goto has this amazing paid system for the commercial searches.
- ▶ 2:04:01 David Rosenthal Once they saw how well the go-to and overture model was working, I think Larry and Sergey were kicking themselves of like, ah, we should have just done this from the beginning.
- ▶ 3:22:58 David Rosenthal When you were telling the story of GoTo and Overture and the launch of TED and, you know, how upset people were, but how, really, I was thinking, like, well, what would the analogy be today?