Fireball is a

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 ...

operated by ''Fireball Labs GmbH'', based in

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. Founded in 1996, Fireball was once the leading search engine in Germany, but quickly declined after being taken over by

Lycos Europe Lycos Europe was a pan-European network of websites, offering services including communication tools, online communities, web search, e-commerce, web hosting, homepage building and Internet access. It was an independent corporation, sharing no corp ...

and the rise of

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. In 2016, Fireball was re-established as an independent company and relaunched.

History

Fireball was originally called ''Flipper'' and started as a project of the Faculty of Computer Science at the

Technical University of Berlin The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...

built by Oli Kai Paulus, Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen born Oertel, Nurhan Yildirim and Benhui Chen as contract work for Gruner + Jahr, one of Germany's largest publishing houses. It was renamed to ''Fireball'' in 1997. The same year, T-Online chose Fireball as its search engine. Fireball quickly rose in popularity and became one of the largest search engines in Germany. By 1998, it was considered market-leader in the country and launched an e-mail service called ''Firemail'' and a news search engine called ''Paperball''. Fireball was mostly focused on German-language results, for international search results it used AltaVista. In March 2000 Fireball was taken over by

. Under the ownership of Lycos, development of Fireball slowed. The takeover by Lycos as well as the rise of

caused Fireball to massively lose market-share within a short time. By mid-2000, Fireball's market share had dropped to 22% and further eroded to 10% in 2001. Despite several attempts to relaunch the service, its market share continued to decline to 2.5% in 2002 and only 0.3% in 2005. In 2002, Fireball ceased to be an independent company and was run directly by Lycos Europe. In 2009, Lycos Europe was dissolved and Fireball was sold to Swiss company ''Ambrosia AG'', which ran the service until 2016. In 2016, Fireball was again sold, this time to a group of investors from Munich who re-established Fireball as an independent company. A completely overhauled version of the service, with a strong focus on privacy, was launched the same year. Search results are nowadays mostly based on Bing.

References

{{Web search engines navbox Internet search engines German websites Companies based in Munich