Closure of Atomz. An alternative solution

[kpa]

That's a shame - I remember using Atomz many years ago and back then it was quite good. But then our needs changed and we moved to ZOOM and have been using that ever since.

[David]

We have heard that Atomz has shut down and their site search function will be discontinued.

This is in addition to Picosearch's announcement that it is closing its doors as well. It hasn't been a good month for companies doing site search solutions.

For any customers looking for a alternative replacement site search solution we are offering a 30% discount off Zoom Enterprise. Email us for a coupon code.

As information is hard to come by, now that their site has been shut down, here is a short posthumous history of Atomz.

A company called Avivo Corporation was founded in 1998 (the same year as us, as it happens) by several former Macromedia executives. The public face and main product of Avivo was Atomz. Then in 2005 Avivo was purchased by WebSideStory. WebSideStory then acquired a company called Visual Sciences in 2006, and renamed itself to Visual Sciences. A short while after this in Oct 2007, Omniture purchased Visual Sciences for $394M. At the time Omniture was referred to as the Borg as they took over all their competitors. Then in Oct 2009 Adobe purchased Omniture (for $1.8B). Adobe went after Omniture for their web analytics solutions, but they also picked up Atomz along the way. By this time Atomz was a tiny part of of the overall Omniture / Adobe business. It didn't even rate a mention in the Adobe press release at the time of the take over.

Atomz at one point had more than 50,000 customers and according to insider reports made money and didn't take much effort to run. Nevertheless Adobe shut it down. Atomz somewhat disingenuously advertised it services as free, but once you had signed up then the 'upgrade' options are disclosed. Their pricing depended on the number of pages indexed. As an example it was $250 per year to search up to 20,000 web pages. (roughly 5x the price of our product by the way).

The only explanation I have seen from Adobe regarding the shut down is an E-mail saying, "Unfortunately this service has been retired, and will no longer be available beginning on 3/31/14". Adobe cared so little for the product that they didn't even bother keeping the home page of Atomz web site live to explain the situation to people. If you believe the twits on twitter, the plug was pulled without notice.

Even more stupid was that Adobe didn't try to do an industry sale of Atomz prior to shutting it down. I am sure we would have made an offer to purchase the service and keep it running.

If anyone has any additional information on the closure, please let us know.

R.I.P Atomz.