QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Thu 6th October 2011, 12:33am)
Bomis was not a "search engine" per se, though it did have a search box. It was more like a
webring system, or a Yahoo-style website directory.
As was remarked in the past, Bomis started out as a general-interest portal, mostly because Wales and Shell couldn't decide what to feature or cover.
But by 1997, they'd figured out the one thing the web was missing at the time: a way to find "babe pics". Of course, they blew it by not
rushing into that area quickly and developing content. Instead they were lazy--allowing others to post links to content, webring-style.
By 1998, more sleazy and ruthless people than them were putting up adult-material websites, usually requiring payment for access.
Bomis made some money from ads and affiliate links, but they apparently chose to sit around and wait for money to fall on them.
Because they didn't pursue marketing deals with the content producers aggressively, they didn't get very far. Just another also-ran of Web 1.0.
PS: Tim Shell
still owns the bomis.com domain---until November 2012. I wonder if it has any kind of commercial value. Doubtful.
Also, they've managed to convince archive.org to eliminate all the old snapshots of bomis.com, going back to 1996.
Yes, they were there, only a couple of months ago. You see? The Net makes it easy to "rewrite history" and make the past disappear.
The only thing that makes Bomis stand out in my memory were the snotty wisecracks
at the top of every page, that changed automatically when refreshed.
That's about the size of it. I could have said "web ring repository" but then I'd have
had to explain what I meant...
Tim was responsible for the list of "Bomis slogans." I think he had over 1,000 of them. He invited some people to contribute slogans and I added a few dozen myself, just out of fun.
In 1999 or so, Bomis imported the content of ODP en masse, making ODP categories into web rings. When I started working on Nupedia, I was told to look at ODP as an example of how open source principles could be applied to content. I remember being very impressed by the fact that many people, at the time, were bitching and complaining about the massive ODP bureaucracy. I myself became an ODP editor of a few categories, just to learn more about how it worked. This is one of the reasons we began with "ignore all rules" and why I repeatedly told people not to become insular and to avoid ranking people by seniority. Of course, my early warnings were ignored, and the spirit of "ignore all rules" was twisted all out of recognition, as if by a cargo cult. After I left, Wikipedia replicated the same sort of pretentious bureaucratic and rule-heavy nonsense of ODP.
This is probably human nature, of course. It would have taken a far greater person than I was (and a rather freer hand than Wales gave me) to convert the raw humanity of Wikipedia (lots and lots of Slashdotters) into an open, constitutionally-minded, more or less reasonable "democratic" sort of polity.
Bomis
Peter Damian Bomis 
