Remember Go.com and the ease of securing a top ranking for your site within the search engine results just by gaming the old Go.com GoGuides system?
Those were the golden years of SEO : Go.com, Altavista, Excite, HotBot, Lycos and Yahoo were the more popular search engines on the market and the most desired sites to obtain high rankings within, that is until Google came along.
Disney owned Go.com, and it was a hub at the time for ESPN, ABC and other Disney properties. In the same fashion that Fox is currently using to boost MySpace traffic via FX and Fox Television, ABC and ESPN would actively promote Go.com Search and Go.com Channels on their network shows and during commercials. The sky seemed to be the limit, then Disney dropped their human directory driven search technology and the Go.com portal all but vanished.
Now, Disney is making another web publishing push by reinventing another one of their long term properties, Family.com.
The Associated Press writes that the new Family.com (launching next week) will be a social media driven search & user generated content site :
By contrast, the new site is a one-stop site for parents, especially mothers, providing everything from Internet search to user-generated articles on key topics such as education and food, and, eventually, a “ParentPedia,” a compilation of information on 1,000 topics that can be expanded by users.
Parents have become a larger part of Disney’s online audience, accounting for nearly half of the 25 million unique visits per month to the Disney.com site, the company said. Most of those are moms.
Part of the Family.com experience will be the Technorati influenced “Family 1,000” ; a prefiltered list of smaller Web sites that typically do not rank high on searches using traditional Web search sites such as Google and Yahoo.
Given the soon to be launched Family.com and its social media and search direction, one has to wonder if Disney sees opportunity in revamping the old Go.com search driven network which was given up on way too early.
