It was founded in 1998 by Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, based voice portal infrastructure company named Quackware.
Quack followed with a set of information services from movie listings (inspired by, but expanding upon, Moviefone) to news, weather and stock quotes.
[citation needed] Quack received its first venture funding from HDL Capital in 1999 and moved operations to Mountain View in Silicon Valley, California in 1999.
"Quack"'s name derived from the company goal of providing not only voice-based services, but more broadly "Quick Ubiquitous Access to Consumer Knowledge".
Quack.com was spoofed in The Simpsons in March 2002 in the episode "Blame It on Lisa" in which a "ComQuaak" sign is replaced by another equally crazy telecom company name.