The end of Excite as we know it

(Nov. 30 2001) Infospace will take over the Excite.com portal from Excite@Home. The portal lives on, but the Excite search engine goes to the place where all search engines go when they die: the large back up tape in the sky.

Under agreement disclosed to the bankruptcy court, InfoSpace will power the search engine and directory at Excite.com, and will sell and/or license the portal's other components (news, horoscopes, TV listings etc) to consumer portal iWon.

This means that InfoSpace will take over domain names, trademarks and user traffic associated with the Excite.com Web site. It will not assume the materials or costs associated with Excite's physical assets, including hardware, employees or debt.

For Infospace this is a good deal indeed. The price is low, according to Internet.com no more than 10 million US$. In the middle of the dot com frenzy it was reckoned to be worth 7.8 billion dollars. Excite remains one of the Web's most popular portals and the site will bring a lot of new visitors to Infospace.

"Search and directory are at the core of InfoSpace's wireline business and Excite is a large opportunity to expose millions of users to our high-quality products," says York Baur, InfoSpace executive vice president, wireline and broadband. "Excite users should be assured that Excite.com will remain and will offer the same high quality experience and services that it always has."

The problem is, of course, that Infospace will not offer the same experience and services that it always has. Infospace is not buying the unique Excite search engine that now powers the Excite.com portal. Instead it will use the Dogpile metasearch engine.

At the moment Dogpile listings is heavily dominated by paid results (i.e. ads), making it one of the less valuable metasearch engines on the Web. Infospace is, however, reportedly trying to improve the quality of the results, and will probably let the metasearch engine fetch results from more search engines in the future.

The Excite directory will now be powered by LookSmart results.

For Internet searchers this means that we have lost yet another alternative search engine, well two actually, as Excite.com has provided one of the most decent current news search engines on the Net.

Fortunately there are other candidates out there, ready to take over Excite's serious searchers, including search sites like Google and Fast AllTheWeb. These users will probably not settle for a metasearch engine like Dogpile.

Infospace press release
Excite
Excite in big trouble (Pandia)

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