Ancient history

In 1996, Merien ten Houten and I founded ilse.nl, the first Dutch search engine.

Students at the time, we never imagined that today, the company that had its foundation on ilse.nl - Ilse Media - would be one of the biggest and most influential internet publishers in The Netherlands.

We had left Ilse Media years ago and went on to do other things, but we still had plenty of ideas for ilse.nl.

Recent history

We approached Ilse Media with our ideas for something different. After pitching the ideas, together with a realisation that fighting Google with yet-another-search-engine wasn't the way to go, we struck a deal: Merien and I, through our company Netwise, were given an exclusive licence to use the ilse.nl domain.

Now

At the moment, we're developing our new website. There's nothing to show just yet, but we have plenty of ideas that we're working on right now. In Q3/Q4 2009 we will go live with a new and improved ilse.nl.