The Olé search engine (acronym for ''Ordenamientos de Links Especializados'') was the first Internet search engine available in Spanish. It was opened to the public on 1 January 1996, at the addres
ole.es
History
The project was the result of a proposal by
Pep Vallés, an employee of the public Fundació Catalana per la Recerca (FCR), for the creation of an Internet search engine to promote the implementation of the network in Catalan companies. The project was financed by the foundation itself, but shortly afterwards it was sold to Pep Valls himself for 200,000 pesetas in a controversial privatization.
Olé initially worked much like a directory. The Cinet team scoured the site for Spanish language resources for several months before its launch. They tried to cross-check information and verify its availability. The site was opened to the public on 1 January 1996 with around 2,000 references, after analysing more than 50,000 references. In March 1996, the site had more than one million hits. This number was growing almost exponentially and was later confirmed.
Over time, Olé diversified its services to include email, chat and bulletin boards. It went on to partner with other European portals, including
Alleurope.
A survey carried out by AIMC-EGM in 1998 ranked Olé as the third most visited site by Spanish Internet users, after
Yahoo
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...
! and
El País Digital.
Telefónica
In March 1999, the heads of Olé and
Telefónica
, S.A. () is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company with registered office and headquarters located in two different places, both in Madrid, Spain. It is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the ...
signed a partnership agreement to become leaders in the Portuguese-Spanish content market. The Spanish multinational undertook to offer the portal's services free of charge to its customers in Spain, Portugal and South America, including free search and free e-mail.
Shortly afterwards, Telefónica improved its agreement with the purchase of Olé's technology for around 3,000 million pesetas and rights to shares in
Terra
Terra may often refer to:
* Terra (mythology), primeval Roman goddess
* An alternate name for planet Earth, as well as the Latin name for the planet
Terra may also refer to: Geography Astronomy
* Terra (satellite), a multi-national NASA scient ...
, Telefónica's new portal. At the time of signing, the portal had approximately 5 million visits per month with a total of 27 million page views.
[{{Cite news , last=Lis , first=Patricia Fernández de , date=1999-05-27 , title=Telefónica centra en Olé su cambio de estrategia para Internet , url=https://elpais.com/diario/1999/05/27/sociedad/927756016_850215.html , access-date=2024-01-11 , work=El País , language=es , issn=1134-6582]
Olé's search engine eventually disappeared and was replaced by
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company ...
, which was later acquired by Terra.
References
Internet service providers of Spain
Telefónica
Defunct internet search engines