I always liked Yahoo. Not the later stage Yahoo, the unmovable behemoth that consumed CEO’s and startups. But the earlier one. The one started by two students who just wanted to index the early web. When I first got online, in 1996, they were huge and the default gateway to The World Wide Web, as it was still spelled out at the time.
A few years later, in 2004, I started wondering if it would be possible to resurrect the original concept that was the basis of Yahoo: a human edited portal that helped you find stuff. We would invite people to build collections of links around certain subjects. They would get a share of (Google ads) revenue. It would be easier to find stuff than using google. It would be based on expert opinions.
It was a mix of Yahoo, Mahalo, Wikipedia and squidoo. I wrote a basic plan, found a developer and even came up with a name: Searcle.com
To me it was a perfect domain name. A combination of circle and search became Searcle. The link collections that people would manage would be called Circles, of course, and you would be able to search them.
Unfortunately this was at the same time that TheNextWeb.com was starting to take off and I devoted most of my energy to that instead of Searcle. Then Mahalo came and then other projects came and went, and eventually Searcle.com ended up on my scrapyard of amazingly promising ideas that went nowhere.
We started with Intermediads.com and today we are adding Searcle.com to our list of domains for sale. You can buy the domain through our auction at Flippa where we are also selling Intermediads.com and Userati.com. Bidding starts at $10.
The sale includes:
The domain
The January 2008 one page executive summary (download here)
Follow-up post when you buy it
Follow-up post when you sell your company to Facebook, Google or Twitter
Basically you are buying yourself a guaranteed review on The Next Web, something that money usually can’t buy, so that alone is worth thousands of dollars.
Bidding starts at $10, right now:
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