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Search
Engine Marriages and Scandal in a Summer of Love
by Mike Banks Valentine copyright 2003
At a party held in a novel conference call of
celebrating financial analysts Yahoo announced
July 14 that they've proposed to Overture!
http://searchengineoptimism.com/Yahoo_acquire_Overture1.html
This latest announcement came just after Overture
wed both Altavista and Fast/AllTheWeb and not
long after Yahoo announced their marriage to Inktomi.
What a racy family! More romance and courtship
is detailed in another story.
http://searchengineoptimism.com/searchquake.html
PPC advertisers recieved a press release from
Overture by email on Monday outlining the proposal
and setting the marriage date (subject to SEC
blessings and counsel ;-)
So let's hear of our happy couple, er family,
um group.
The Groom, Yahoo, born in 1994, married Inktomi
(born in 1996), in 2002. Nobody is talking about
what happened to the recent bride, it may be that
she'll be part of an expanding harem Yahoo keeps.
Other marriages have included GeoCities, eGroups,
HotJobs and WebRing and they all remain a part
of the Yahoo (ahem!) family.
http://searchengineoptimism.com/Yahoo_acquires_inktomi.html
The Bride, Overture was born in `98 (as GoTo).
Altavista, born in 1995. Overture married both
AltaVista and AlltheWeb (born in 1997) in early
2003. Yahoo will officially wed Overture by about
the fall of 2003 (Sigh, I love Autumn weddings).
I'm not sure who is related to whom in this group,
but they seem very happy as typical American inbred
corporate families go.
The romantic moment made me all misty eyed and
had me reminiscing of other sweet courtships and
marriages of search engines through the last eight
years or so. I got out my diary and reviewed those
other cherished moments.
Infoseek, born in 1995 married go.com, killed
by Disney in 2001. DirectHit, born in 1998 married
AskJeeves in 2000, died 2002. WebCrawler, born
in early 1994, married AOL in 1995, had affair
with Excite winter of 1996. The WebCrawler spider
withered in 2001, is now a lonely metasearch engine.
Magellan, born in 1995 married Excite in 1996,
died in 2001. Snap, born in 1997, later married
NBC and took the married name of NBCi, died in
2001.
Hmmmm. I guess those weren't such happy moments,
but wait, not all of them met untimely death.
Excite, born in 1995, married Magellan and adopted
doomed WebCrawler in 1996, married @Home. Excite
stopped crawling in December 2001, but still sits
by the window and dreams of happier days out traveling
the wild web.
Info above chronicled at
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175241
AskJeeves, born in 1998 married Teoma (born in
2000) in 2001. Lycos, born in 1994, married HotBot
in October 1998. Then in the first openly polygamous
marriage, Lycos and Terra Networks married in
October 2000 to become Terra Lycos. HotBot became
depressed and started seeing other men, stringing
her keyword phrases among four suitors. Google,
FAST, Teoma and Inktomi.
LookSmart, born in October 1996 and Wisenut, born
in 2001 married in April 2002. They live a quiet
life in seclusion, with LookSmart providing some
search results to MSN and wavering between a career
as a search engine and PPC search provider. Looksmart
has a baby crawler called Grub that is pawned
off on babysitters constantly crawling the web
from donated computers while LS is off seeking
pay-per-click in hopes of making it big one day.
http://searchengineoptimism.com/looksmart_crawl_grubby.html
Netscape was born in 1994. Open Directory was
born in 1998. AOL NetFind was born in 1997. Netscape
married the Open Directory in November of 1998.
AOL married Netscape in December 1998. Many found
this openly polygamous relationship just scandalous!
Then when AOL married Time-Warner things turned
sour for the whole mixed up group and they are
still struggling to unite the odd family. Divorce
and ruin are rumored. Netscape (the browser) was
severely brain damaged in an accident that nobody
will talk about outside the family.
So all of this marriage talk has eyes turning
to the only confirmed bachelor of the search world,
MSN search. Rumors have circulated for years about
potential suitors, but MSN assiduously avoids
courtship and has always outsourced search technology,
and is currently powered by LookSmart and Inktomi.
In June the rumors stopped as MSN announced a
major decision to stay single with a new initiative
to build it's own search technology. MSNBOT has
started crawling the web all by itself. They don't
like to talk about the lackluster love life and
will only say . . .
"MSNBOT is not currently indexing for the
MSN Search Engine, so your site may or may not
show up in MSN Search results today. Although
we have not set a date, it is our intention to
eventually integrate the crawled contents into
MSN Search results."
http://www.msnsearch.com/msnbot.htm
Lisa Gurry, a group product manager with MSN,
said in an article at SearchEngineWatch, "We
view it as a three horse race between ourselves,
Yahoo and Google, with Google in the lead."
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2230291
Poor lonely MSN has no romance, would rather bet
the ponies.
Well if it is a horse race, Yahoo may gain on
leader Google if they are able to integrate their
Inktomi and Overture (and by extension, Altavista
and Fast/AllTheWeb) purchases into relevant search
results that searchers trust. But all of the Jockeys
on those horses will be whipping their charges
toward the finish line with an eye to the winning
purse. ;-)
Mixed metaphors aside, the search engine soap
opera heats up our next burning episode of "As
the World (Wide Web) Turns!"
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Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization
specialist practicing ethical small business SEO
http://SEOptimism.com/
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