Netbot was the first commercial

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

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 produ ...

. Founded by

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

Computer Science professors

Oren Etzioni Oren Etzioni (born 1964) is an American entrepreneur, Professor Emeritus of computer science, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). On June 15, 2022, he announced that he will step down as CEO of AI2 effective ...

and Daniel S. Weld the company was funded by ARCH Venture Partners,

Alta Partners Alta Partners is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco which invests primarily in biotechnology and life science companies. History The company was founded in 1996 by Dr. Jean Deleage, Ph.D., who was also a founder of the venture capi ...

and the

Madrona Venture Group Madrona Venture Group is an American venture capital firm, founded in 1995 and based in Seattle, Washington. Madrona specializes in seed, startup, Series A and early stage investments. Company Madrona was founded in 1995 by Tom Alberg, Paul Go ...

, 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 MetaCrawler is a search engine. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace and was created by Erik Selberg. It was originally a metasearch engine, as its name suggests. Throughout its lifetime it combined web search results from sources including G ...

, 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. S ...

, before licensing it to Go2Net. In October 1997, Netbot was acquired by the

Excite Excitation, excite, exciting, or excitement may refer to: * Excitation (magnetic), provided with an electrical generator or alternator * Excite Ballpark, located in San Jose, California * Excite (web portal), web portal owned by IAC * Electron ex ...

portal for $35M.Excite to buy NetBot

CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

, 1997-10-16. Retrieved 2011-2-28"

References

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