Direct Hit Technologies, Inc. was a
Boston
Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...
-based
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
company that provided search engine services to major web portals and operated a public search engine at directhit.com. Founded in April 1998 by
Gary Culliss and
Mike Cassidy, the Direct Hit search engine utilized the anonymous searching activity of millions of web searchers to rank web sites based on a number of
patented
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
algorithms
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for per ...
, such as how long searchers spent viewing each web page and where a site was ranked in the original search results list. The Direct Hit search engine technology was invented by
Gary Culliss and is the subject of the following US Patents: US Pat. 6,006,222, US Pat. 6,078,916 and US Pat. 6,014,665 all entitled "Method for organizing information." Direct Hit filed to go public through
Robertson Stephens in late 1999, and was acquired by
Ask Jeeves in January 2002.
See also
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List of search engines
Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases.
By content/topic
General ...
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Index (search engine)
Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, an ...
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Web indexing
Web indexing, or Internet indexing, comprises methods for indexing the contents of a website or of the Internet as a whole. Individual websites or intranets may use a back-of-the-book index, while search engines usually use keywords and Metadata ( ...
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Web search query
References
Online companies of the United States
Technology companies based in the Boston area
Defunct companies based in Massachusetts
Defunct internet search engines
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