ESPNcricinfo is believed to be the largest
cricket-related website on the World Wide Web. Content includes news,articles, live scorecards,live text commentary and a comprehensive and searchable
database called 'StatsGuru', of historical matches and players from the 18th century to the present. On 11 June 2007,
ESPN announced that it had bought Cricinfo from
Wisden group.
History
Conception
ESPNcricinfo (originally CricInfo) was launched in 1993 by Dr. Simon King, a British researcher at the
University of Minnesota with help from students and researchers at universities around the world. It initially operated as a volunteer-based collective, and started life as a simple
IRC bot. It was soon made available via
Gopher as well, and with the advent of the
Mosaic web browser in April 1993 became one of the earliest content
web sites on the
Internet.
While a company, CricInfo Ltd, was formed in 1996, CricInfo remained essentially a volunteer run operation until late 1999 and was not fully staffed until late 2000. The site was entirely reliant on contributions from avid fans around the world who spent many hours compiling electronic scorecards and contributing them to CricInfo's comprehensive archive, as well as keying in live scores from games around the world using CricInfo's scoring software, "dougie". In 2006, Cricinfo's estimated worth was $150 million.
Growth and......
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