Google Video was created in January 2005 as an effort by Google to take control of Internet searches for audiovisual content. The service was first called Google Video Search and it was created to look for information within television programs. In the beginning, it only indexed material from eight television networks in the United States. In order to view or upload videos, it was necessary to download an application to your computer. The aim was to create an online television channel. It was released in permanent beta status, as is usual with all new Google services. In Google's words, the company justified its new creation with the following statement: “Our mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes video.” By now you all know that Google bought YouTube in October 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. But Google Video was created even before YouTube, although the aims of the two were completely different. YouTube focused on users, collecting their content at no charge and exclusively through the use of its browser, something which Google Video did not do, and which was surely the cause of its failure. Google Video used an application called Google Video Viewer as its desktop application. The development of ...

I decided to write about Altavista after being contacted by a Failbeta reader, Oliver. In reality, as I mentioned to him, perhaps it is necessary to talk about various search engines which have fallen by the wayside due to the success of the absolute leader, Google. We'll leave that for later articles. Let's take a look at the history of this search engine, which was once the largest and most used in the world. Altavista was created by Louis Monier and Michael Burrows of the company Digital in December 1995. Monier would later work for Google until August 2007, when he left to create the new search engine Cuil. As for Burrows, he later worked for Microsoft and currently works for Google. Google's success caused an amazing influx of talent from its competitors. Altavista was hugely successful from the start. It went from receiving 300,000 hits on its first days to 80 million hits a day two years later. In 1996 it became the search provider for Yahoo! and two years later, in 1998, it was bought by Compaq. It was then later bought by Overture in 2003, and this company was in turn bought by Yahoo!. Remarkable. If we look back a ...

Yahoo! Mash was another social network by Yahoo!, launched in September of 2007. After a failed attempt to purchase Facebook, they decided to create a new social network. Mash wanted to be Myspace, My Yahoo! and Facebook all together. They had even planned to publish an application platform like the latter. As distinguishing elements they had the wiki mode, by which every contact from your network was able to edit pages or add modules. As elements inspired in Myspace, they offered the possibility of customizing pages to an extent that they could damage our pupils. I recommend you the analysis that Antonio Ortiz made then. Two days ago, its closure was announced. They don't explain the reason, but we can imagine it. These words by Mariano Amartino may serve as reflection: “If it was that simple to make a community grow, Google would have never bought YouTube, Yahoo! would have never bought MyBlogLog and some media would be already the owners of the whole traffic of the countries where they have influence.” Yahoo! still has Yahoo! 360. What I don't know is how long it will take until we speak about it here.