Netbot was the first commercial

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

price comparison service A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare pr ...

. Founded by

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

Computer Science professors Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld the company was funded by ARCH Venture Partners, Alta Partners and the

Madrona Venture Group Madrona Venture Group is an American venture capital firm, founded in 1995 and based in Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a populat ...

, and the University of Washington was also a shareholder. Netbot introduced the Jango comparison shopping “agent” first as a browser plug-in and later, as a server product. In addition, the company operated MetaCrawler, a

metasearch engine A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. ...

, before licensing it to Go2Net. In October 1997, Netbot was acquired by the Excite portal for $35M.Excite to buy NetBot
CNET, 1997-10-16. Retrieved 2011-2-28"

References

Comparison shopping websites Domain-specific search engines {{commerce-website-stub