Port 414 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), officially assigned by IANA to a service called InfoSeek. It's a ghost port now—a remnant of the early commercial Internet, when search engines were new enough that one of them got its own port number.
What InfoSeek Was
InfoSeek was a search engine founded by Steve Kirsch in 1994.1 This was the early days of the web, when Yahoo was still a directory organized by humans and Google didn't exist yet. InfoSeek launched in January 1994 as a pay-for-use service, then relaunched free in February 1995.2
In 1995, InfoSeek struck a deal with Netscape to become the default search engine in Netscape Navigator—the browser that dominated the web at the time. By September 1997, InfoSeek had 7.3 million visitors per month and was the 7th most visited website.3
Port 414 was assigned to InfoSeek for communication between clients and its servers.4 This was before the web consolidated around HTTP and HTTPS. The Internet was still figuring out its protocols, and it wasn't obvious yet that everything would eventually flow through ports 80 and 443.
What Happened
Disney bought InfoSeek in 1999, merged it with other properties to create the Go.com portal, then shut it down in February 2001.5 The service lasted about seven years.
Port 414 remains officially assigned in the IANA registry, but the service it was created for no longer exists. The port sits unused in most network configurations—a reserved space for a protocol that died when the company behind it was acquired and dismantled.
Why This Port Matters
Port 414 represents a moment in Internet history when the landscape was different. Search engines were commercial ventures fighting for market share. They built custom protocols and got their own port assignments. The architecture of the Internet was still being negotiated.
Today, nearly everything runs over HTTP/HTTPS on ports 80 and 443. Search engines are web applications accessed through browsers, not custom protocols with dedicated ports. Port 414 is evidence that it didn't have to be this way—that there was a moment when the Internet could have developed differently.
Current Status
Port 414 is essentially abandoned. You might see it flagged in security databases because unused ports sometimes get repurposed by malware,6 but there's no legitimate service commonly using this port today.
To check what's listening on port 414 on your system:
Linux/Mac:
Windows:
If something is listening on port 414, it's either legacy software from the InfoSeek era (unlikely) or something that shouldn't be there.
The Bigger Picture
Well-known ports (0-1023) require root/administrator privileges to bind to. They were reserved for system-level services that were supposed to be important and permanent. Port 414's assignment to a commercial search engine shows how young the Internet was in the mid-1990s—young enough that a startup could get a well-known port for a service that would be gone within a decade.
Most well-known ports above 100 tell similar stories: services that seemed essential at the time, protocols that made sense in context, infrastructure that has since been replaced. Port 414 is one of those doors that used to lead somewhere and now just opens to empty space.
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