The future of the Excite and Inktomi search engines

Regular readers will know about our concern for search engine variety. You may indeed get a long way with an excellent search engine like Google or a Web directory like Yahoo! Still, it would be a great loss to the search and research community if these were to be the only serious search sites available.

Not even Google is able to cover the whole Net, and in all industries there should be competition to spur innovation and creativeness.

The search engines and portals have felt the pain of dot com crash in a severe way. Although the overall spending on Web advertising probably has not been reduced as much as some would like us to believe, it is certainly true that the revenue cannot keep up with the expectations of stock holders and investors. This is the reason why Disney finally pulled the plug on the Go portal and the Infoseek search engine (what's left of Go is not worth mentioning).

Excite lives on -- for now

As reported by Pandia, Excite@Home has been considering selling the Excite portal and search engine. It will close the German, Spanish and French portals, as has already abolished the ancient Magellan search site.

According to the Industry Standard, however, the company has decided not to sell the American portal -- at least not yet. Excite@Home CEO Patti Hart has said the company is "moving rapidly from being in sales mode to operating ... on a scaled-down basis."

It is unclear how this will affect the content of the Portal or the development of the Excite search engine, but the site will survive -- at least for the time being.

Inktomi lives on

Inktomi has also faced some heavy weather. Last year it lost its deal with Yahoo!, providing the dominating search directory portal with additional search engine results. Lately Canda.com abandoned Inktomi in favour of metasearch data from Dogpile (which includes pay-per-click listings from GoTo).

On portal and search sites like HotBot, iWon, MSN and AOL Inktomi results are often buried below results from search directories, the pay-per-click search engine GoTo (read: "advertising") and the popularity based search engine Direct Hit.

As Inktomi is trying to get some revenue from selling guaranteed inclusion in its database, this has become a problem. Not only cannot its paid "Search/Submit" service guarantee webmasters a good listing for their sites. It is actually close to impossible to achieve a top ten position in the results served by the Inktomi partners, even if your site is number one in the Intkomi results.

This does not mean that taking part in the "Search/Submit" program is a waste of money. Web masters may succeed when focusing on narrow, less popular, search queries, but it certainly makes the offer less attractive, thus undermining an important revenue stream.

So where's the good news? Well, on June 19 the Inktomi Corp. announced an expanded agreement with MSN to provide its search technology to MSN Asia. Inktomi will provide full-text results for MSN Search in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. MSN expects to deploy the Inktomi-powered search throughout its Asian properties this summer.

Americans and Europeans should not underestimate the role of these markets for search engine development. It is already huge and growing. Hopefully this development will strengthen Inktomi's ability to deliver better search results. Moreover, this deal ends all speculations regarding MSN abandoning Inktomi in favour of Google on its main American site.

Excite@Home Gets Help From Mama (The IndustryStandard)
Inktomi Search/Submit

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