GoTo.com, a ground-breaking pay per click search engine from the Dot Com era, launched a new Alpha version on March 28th, 2017 with a nostalgic design but to little fanfare.
This time it’s billing itself as “A human-powered search platform” with Organic search results instead of Paid listings.
GoTo.com Searches Again!
If like me, you’ve been optimizing websites for what seems like a century, you’re likely to remember when GoTo (before rebranding as Overture) ruled the Pay-Per-Click Search Engine universe.
It was a true pioneer.
Being the first of its kind made it very appealing to other Dot Com companies like Yahoo, who bought it up for its technology and patents, then quickly rolled it into the Yahoo brand as Yahoo Search Marketing.
Well it’s back as announced on its Facebook page.
A Human-Powered Search Platform
GoTo is making a push to be different by positioning itself as a search engine with a human touch. This is an interesting take as algorithms are often critiqued for their nuances that favor link data but lack a human’s perspective. Although they have gotten much better of the years. Here’s how GoTo describes this:
Internet search touches every aspect of our lives, but we at GoTo feel it’s time somebody approached the search field with a more human touch. Algorithm-based results only go so far.
GoTo delivers human-powered search results that reflect multiple perspectives and expertise on any topic. We layer these results on top of conventional search results to provide a better search experience.
Simple & Easy Search Listing Pages
The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is fairly clean and straight-forward. The SERPs contain your typical Website Listings, Images, Videos and any available Collections (more on those below).
Full Search Engine Results Page
Collections – “Become a Curator”
Something that is fairly unique is that GoTo lets you become a curator and publish and share your own Collections that will then show up in search results.
GoTo Collections
These Collections of Links are grouped on another page, which is an interesting way of grouping additional content for a specific entity such as their social media profiles, deeper site pages, Wikipedia articles, etc. Their take on this is insightful:
What is a Collection?
A Collection is a curated set of items (links, images, videos, products, or text) on any subject that sparks your interest. You can answer a how-to question, provide travel tips, share an experience, offer an opinion, or just centralize useful bookmarks. You can make your collections public, private or unlisted.
Find out more about GoTo
They have a short “Story” about their human-powered results and an About page where you can find out who’s behind the new GoTo. (hint: it’s several of the same people who worked on the original GoTo/Overture)
Here are the social profiles that I could find connected to GoTo. They seem to be the most active on Facebook.
What do You Think?
Will GoTo make headway towards reclaiming some of its former glory as a top player in search?
