Fireball (search engine)

Fireball was originally called Flipper and started as a project of the faculty of computer science at the Technical University of Berlin built by Oli Kai Paulus, Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen born Oertel[2], Nurhan Yildirim and Benhui Chen as contract work for Gruner + Jahr[3], one of Germany's largest publishing houses. It was renamed to Fireball in 1997. The same year, T-Online chose Fireball as its search engine. Fireball quickly rose in popularity and became one of the largest search engines in Germany. By 1998, it was considered market-leader in the country[4][5] and launched an e-mail service called Firemail and a news search engine called Paperball.[6] Fireball was mostly focused on German-language results, for international search results it used AltaVista.

In March 2000 Fireball was taken over by Lycos Europe.[7] Under the ownership of Lycos, development of Fireball slowed.[8] The takeover by Lycos as well as the rise of Google caused Fireball to massively lose market-share within a short time. By mid-2000, Fireball's market share had dropped to 22% and further eroded to 10% in 2001.[9] Despite several attempts to relaunch the service, its market share continued to decline to 2.5% in 2002 and only 0.3% in 2005.[10] In 2002, Fireball ceased to be an independent company and was run directly by Lycos Europe.[11]

In 2009, Lycos Europe was dissolved and Fireball was sold to Swiss company Ambrosia AG, which run the service until 2016. In 2016, Fireball was again sold, this time to a group of investors from Munich who re-established Fireball as an independent company. A completely overhauled version of the service, with a strong focus on privacy, was launched the same year. Search results are nowadays mostly based on Bing.