2 ms·

What was the startup?

• hga 16y ago
  Netword. The idea was that companies and people could buy Networds like "Intel annual report" and you could e.g. type into your browser address [whatever that widget it called]: netword/intel annual report And you'd get redirected to the right page on Intel's site (at the time both Netscape and Microsoft Did The Right Thing with the above example (e.g. add .com)). Besides solving search and design problems that hadn't yet been well addressed (this was before Google and truly ubiquitous use of search engines and at the dawn of usable site design) it could have bridged the old media to new media gap. I.e. "Netword foo bar" works a whole lot better than http://www.mycompany.com/foo/bar http://www.mycompany.com/foo/bar or whatever, it's something you might be able to remember from a radio, TV, highway sign etc. ad, less obnoxious on print ads etc. A lot of the upfront development effort was devoted to dealing with misspellings quickly (the custom C++ tree database) and database replication so that it could insanely scale. We were using Digital Alpha hardware so we could have cheated in all sorts of ways just to get launched and then do Customer Development, (ADDED:) but there was this overriding fear that we'd get crushed with demand immediately after launch.