GoTo.com is back!
The brand associated with the commercialization of pay-per-click search has found its way back to the internet.
How’s this for a bit of nostalgia?
Remember GoTo.com and its iconic green and yellow logo? It’s baaaack!
If you weren’t around the domain and online advertising world in the late 90s, you might not be familiar with the site. GoTo.com basically invented the pay-per-click search marketing business that is the basis for Google’s search ads and became key to the domain parking business.
The firm later changed its name to Overture, and ultimately was purchased by Yahoo.
For a long time following Yahoo’s buyout, the GoTo.com domain was owned by Go2 Directory Systems. xAd purchased the assets of Go2 a couple years ago. Now if you go to the domain name you’ll see this:
This fresh site apparently went live last month.
The only thing that looks different is that one of the top searches is the iPad Air – something that certainly wasn’t around in 1999!
The regarding page for the fresh site reads:
Once, there was a search engine that invented a fresh way to connect consumers and businesses. It was called GoTo.com. Recently, the goto.com domain became available and a few of us who were there in the early days decided to purchase it. We’ve got lots of ideas for what to do with goto.com but in the meantime, we thought it would be fun to resurrect goto.com as a search engine. Hats off to the GoTo.com team that helped revolutionize search. We hope you enjoy searching on today’s site. Please leave a comment below or on our Facebook page and let us know what you think.
The domain’s whois record is right now protected by whois privacy. But it may be that xAd still owns it, as two of its executives have roots in Yahoo! Search Marketing/Overture.
