Infoseek

Steve Kirsch, who had earlier founded the mouse maker Mouse Systems, started Infoseek in 1994. For a few years it was one of the big names: it sat behind Netscape's search button and let users refine a query within the results they already had. One of its engineers was Robin Li, who went on to found Baidu.

Disney bought a large stake in 1998 and the rest a year later, merging Infoseek into the Go Network. The entertainment giant wanted its own front door to the web; what it got was a portal nobody needed. The search engine closed in 2001, around the time portals in general lost out to a plain search box.