Netbot was the first commercial

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price comparison service A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare produ ...

. Founded by

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

Computer Science professors Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld the company was funded by ARCH Venture Partners, Alta Partners and the Madrona Venture Group, and the University of Washington was also a shareholder. Netbot introduced the Jango comparison shopping “agent” first as a browser plug-in and later as a server product. In addition, the company operated

MetaCrawler MetaCrawler is a search engine. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace and was created by Erik Selberg. It was originally a metasearch engine, as its name suggests. Throughout its lifetime it combined web search results from sources including G ...

, a

metasearch engine A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. ...

, before licensing it to Go2Net. In October 1997, Netbot was acquired by the Excite portal for $35M.Excite to buy NetBot
CNET, 1997-10-16. Retrieved 2011-2-28"

References

Comparison shopping websites Domain-specific search engines {{commerce-website-stub