Long ago—maybe 1997?—there was a website that was going to solve what was a real problem at the time, before decent search: finding the right site among several. For example, if you went to www.delta.com, it would ask if you meant the airline, faucets, or hotels?
It died quickly when AltaVista showed up, of course.
Anyone remember the name of the service? Or how it was allegedly going to work?
AltaVista?
WebCrawler, perhaps? Dates back to 1994.
Ask Jeeves?
Before there were search engines there were web directories.
Are you thinking of one of them?
Are you talking about Archie? Yahoo? Can you describe how you used the service, or what it looked like?
I don’t think it ever launched, and it wasn’t a site itself per se. It sure wasn’t any of the names suggested here. The only way I can think it COULD have worked was either through a DNS hijack or cooperation by the site owning the “base” name. E.g., delta.com is the airline, so they would have gone to the airline and said “Let us take over your homepage and it will be this lightweight ‘Which of these did you really want?’ thing”. Remember that bandwidth was still relatively expensive, so being able to avoid all those bogus hits might have been appealing to those “base” site owners.
OTOH it was Web 1.0, before the 2001 crash, so you could get VC money by talking about stupid stuff (cf. CueCat, websites that were going to offer the ability to smell products…)
What’s left of my brain wants the name to have been two syllables starting with a C or a P, which I realize is beyond vague.
Was it RealNames ?
My memory of the early web is starting to get fuzzy, but this really sounds like something that Lycos touted.
I think that’s it! The two-syllable part, at least, did stick in what’s left of my brain. Timing is right, and the fact that it would have been IE-specific at first, then working as a browser plugin, hadn’t registered at all but makes sense. And there’s darned little left on the web about it that I can find beyond the links in that Wikipedia article.
Thanks! Now I can die a (slightly) happier person.
InfoSeek was the best search engine back then. Nothing ever replaced it. I could find things there that Yahoo could never find.
Talk about a low bar… 
I continue to be amazed that Yahoo retained any value at all after about 2005.
Why? It’s a very popular front page news aggregator. Its Sports pages are well organized and popular for getting scores and such.
The Wayback Machine has hundreds of screenshots of www.realnames.com, going back to 1998.
Of course it does, and I should have thought of that! Thanks.
Yahoo was a web directory though, wasn’t it? You had to submit your site by hand and choose the categories it would be listed under. And it tended to be reserved mostly for official organisations rather than wacky Geocities ephemera.
LOL! Yahoo was all I could think of but InfoSeek beat every other search engine for the things I looked for. That was back in my collecting days and I would find all kinds of things on InfoSeek.
I think “Why Yahoo s***s” would be another whole thread.
Meanwhile, I’ve looked at the Wayback Machine and I’m sure that was it–thanks again! And
https://web.archive.org/web/19990508061437/http://www.centraal.com/WhatAreRNs-Deal.html explains the biz model.
Ooh, and domain was centraal.com – I said “two syllables starting with a C or P”! A win for what’s left of my brain, even if the RealNames part is the externally facing version.