The Walt Disney Company, bruised and bloodied after $396 million in losses last year, has pulled the plug on the Go Network and it's Disney Internet Group. The news was broken in a surprise announcement by the entertainment giant yesterday (Monday, January 29, 2001). Go.com is one of the world's major search portals but despite changes and millions of dollars of advertising, it never reached the position of an industry leader that Disney envisioned when they launched the service a few years ago.

Always the Bridesmaid…

Disney had big plans when they launched the Go Network after their acquisition of the Infoseek search engine in 1998. The site was designed to go head to head with industry leaders such as Yahoo and AOL. Unfortunately, they were never able to move from their rather meager market share. The latest MediaMetrix numbers has Go ranked 7th out of the top 50 most visited sites, well behind industry leaders MSN, Yahoo and AOL. They have a 16% share of all visitors to the top 50 sites, compared to 61% for MSN and 60% for Yahoo. The failure to become a top traffic draw had severely impacted Go's ability to attract advertising revenue. Like so many Net based business models, they just couldn't turn a profit.

Despite the bloodshed, Disney CEO Michael Eisner continues the embrace the Internet as a primary plank in the corporation's plans for the future. "The Internet continues to be a central focus of our company's business strategy,'' said Eisner. "We believe this action should help us gain greater competitive advantage as we leverage Disney's creative content, brands and other assets.''

The fact remains, however, that Disney's decision to pull the plug on what was one of the Internet's major players could be a harbinger of things to come. AltaVista has already had a round of layoffs earlier this month and it's parent company, CMGI, may consider following Disney's lead and move to cut losses by shutting down their site.

Going Their Own Way

It should be noted that Go was the only major search portal that never partnered with another supplier for its results. Both the directory and the search engine were Disney property. While this is consistent with the corporation's "Disney-centric" view of the universe (if it's not Disney, how good can it be?) I wonder if this decision to go it alone ultimately contributed to Go's downfall. There had to be huge overhead involved in taking on the responsibility for providing all the content on the site.

Noble Roots

The fact was, Infoseek was doing very nicely, thank you, before it became Disneyized. It was recognized as one of the top search engines on the web. The speed with which it indexed new sites made it a favorite with webmasters. The freshness of its index and the relevancy of its results endeared it to web users. The unveiling of UltraSeek and it's advanced search capabilities made the future seem rosy indeed for this search engine.

Then came Disney. Along with what seemed like an unlimited advertising budget and the corporation's extraordinary brand awareness, came a corporate vision of what the site should become. The volunteer driven Go Guides Directory was introduced and was added to the Infoseek powered search platform. Moves were made to make the main site a portal to the entire family of Disney sites.

Soon, it became apparent that Go was struggling. Disney had taken what was a darn good search engine and turned it into a bloated amalgam that was neither a good engine nor a good directory nor a good portal. It screwed up the Internet's golden rule, "Do at least one thing better than anyone else."

Putting the Wheels Back On

As Go started to alienate its loyal customer base, the corporation made moves to differentiate the service from it's competitors. In January, 2000 the company announced the site would no longer be a general search portal but would concentrate instead on becoming a "free time" portal, focusing on entertainment and leisure topics. In practice, we saw little change in the way results were shown on Go.

In September, Disney launched the new look of Go, with what was to be a "friendlier interface". Go Guide directory results were moved "above the fold" and became much more prominent. Apparently, it was too little, too late, as yesterday's announcement marks the swan song of Go.com.

On the Auction Block

So, what does the future hold for Go? Disney will continue to operate a streamlined version of the site until some of the company's sites can establish new turf on the web. It expects the site to be shut down by the end of February. "Our plan is to shut down the site 30 days from today," said Susan Murdy, Go's vice president of communications.

Disney is also looking at selling off some of the individual components. They had already sold off Ultraseek to Inktomi last June. Now, they're looking for buyers for Infoseek and Go Guides. This could prove to be a tough sell. The truth is, there is now far better search technology out there than what Infoseek offers. Google would win any search showdown walking away. And Go Guides would be going against Open Directory, who provide their directory results for free, and LookSmart, whose partners share the revenue from LookSmart's paid express submission fees. Why pay when you can get paid?

What about Site Owners?

Now that Go's gone, or at least heading out the door, what does this mean for site owners? Probably not too much. We currently have Go producing about 5% of all search engine traffic. Unfortunately the sites that will be hardest hit will be the quality sites that managed to be given Go's coveted three star status and were topping their respective Go Guide categories. Because the Go Guide results were so prominent and were further endorsed under the label "Proven Picks", a top ranking could produce a disproportionate amount of traffic. There will be website owners out there that will have reason the greave the passing of Go.

And Now, The End is Near

So, what happened? Well, ironically, what may well be the world's most consistently visionary corporation just didn't get it. I don't believe they ever truly understood what they were getting into. The fact is, the web still hasn't matured. For a corporation to stake a successful claim on this every changing landscape, they have to have deep pockets, the ability to adapt quickly and an almost psychic ability to anticipate what the customer needs.

What Disney needed at the helm of Go.com was a person of vision, who ignored the corporate bean counters and stuck to their dream of what would be. It needed a leader who had an uncanny ability to anticipate what people wanted and was uncompromising in delivering it. It needed someone like, well, like Walt Disney. What it got was a site that was run by corporate committee.