Direct Hit Technologies, Inc. was a

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

-based

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

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 Gary Culliss (born 1970) is an American entrepreneur who has founded several technology companies, including the search engine company Direct Hit Technologies and the interactive voice telecommunications company, SoundBite Communications (NASDAQ: S ...

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

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing c ...

, 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

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 Robertson Stephens is a wealth management firm serving high net worth individuals and family offices. The firm is registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor. Robertson Stephens was founded as ...

and was acquired by Ask Jeeves in January 2000.

References

Online companies of the United States Technology companies based in the Boston area Defunct companies based in Massachusetts {{US-internet-company-stub

See also

References