The INQUIRER'S Top 5 Hot-Back-Then web companies

GOOGLE IS STILL growing at about 50 per cent year on year, and that’s pretty good going we can all agree.

The G-men may be this year’s big thing (and last year’s and the year before that’s) but it’s far from being the only Internet company that has ever been hot, hot, hot in recent years. Unfortunately, what goes up must come down, and most of these guys have fallen by the wayside since their salad days. And the wayside is not what it was, you know.

So let’s hear it for those that flew on waxed wings, like Icarus, not there for the long haul perhaps, but spectacular while they lasted.

5. Netscape. Remember when every PC had the ‘N’ surrounded by shooting stars icon and the ship’s wheel splash screen? For a while back there, you couldn’t get away from Netscape. Its IPO was enormous and Jim Barksdale’s secretary became an instant multimillionaire. Netscape people said nasty things about Microsoft and participated in the thrilling-sounding browser wars. Great. On the other hand, Netscape broke the rules on browser development, suffered a disastrous merger with AOL and had a crappy alliance with Sun. Still, compared to Mosaic, Naviagtor steered us to web heaven for a while, or at least as close to heaven as you can get driving for two years on a 38k modem.

4. Pointcast. Hey, you heard about the new, new thing called the push Internet? That’s right, you just sit there and you get all the latest news PUSHED out to you. The network admins don’t like it but they’re just jealous because they can’t keep up with how the Giants are doing against the other guys in an American sport I know nothing about. Pointcast ended up selling out for a modest sum after perhaps three months of being hot.

3. Yahoo. Don’t call it a search engine, right? It’s a portal. It is by no means a load of lists of things on the Internet either. It has an exclamation mark at the end of the name. How many boring old-media companies have one of those? Exactly. What’s that new search thing? Oh come on, nobody wants a boring screen like that to search from…

2. Alta Vista. It was a DEC project but wisely the server-huggers kept quiet and gave it a trendier brand. Unfortunately, a slip of the keyboard took users to a similarly URLed porn site. Even more unfortunately, this site became toast once a better algorithm was discovered.

1. QXL. This auction site was a big deal at the time before you-know-who came along and sucked all the juice out of the bidding market. µ