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Sucks to be a search engine
The May 2001 Jupiter Media Metrix study ranks Excite as the 7th most popular engine. Unfortunately being popular doesn't necessarily make you rich. Looks like Excite, that engine that hasn't been indexing any of my client's sites in about one year, is going to declare bankruptcy. The word is out on the street that tomorrow is the official day for filing, so we'll see if rumors are true soon enough. Excite is (was) the oldest spidering search engine, launched in 1995. And if it dies, it leaves AltaVista (AV) the title as oldest spidering engine - having outlived other early spiders like WebCrawler, Lycos (now powered by FAST), and Infoseek(formerly GO).
But it's no time for AV to start partying. They're still trying to get profitable -- last week appointing James Barnett as the new CEO and then cutting staff by 30%. They've cut a total of 340 employees, and their popularity as a search engine has plummeted wildly. That same May 2001 Jupiter Media Metrix study ranks the engine as 14th. And if that wasn't average enough, Jupiter is saying the new reports will show AV ranking at about #50 in Sept. A pretty major fall from grace compared to the early days of glory!
The search engine world of Europe has its own woes, with Lycos Europe cutting 300 jobs last week, which is a quarter of its workforce. Reports say they are not making these cuts in order to gain profits - they're making them in order to diminish the total losses from $40 to $15 million. Dare to dream.
FAST (www.alltheweb.com) is releasing conflicting news at the moment. They have just laid off a second round of employees for a total of 90 layoffs this year. But they are also launching a new and much larger version of their search engine index this fall. And the big news here? They are planning to pull off this increased indexing with new software that can spider dynamic pages! Good news for those of you (almost everyone) with dynamic content. Lycos says this doesn't mean it will index every page in an online store, but instead that it will, "let the users find Internet-pages that only demand a click or two in order to bring you to your goal." I'm not sure what that means either. But we'll find out in Oct. when the new indexing capability is scheduled for launch.
And finally, there is some good search engine industry news. Inktomi has announced a number of new partners who are reselling its paid inclusion programs. Inktomi has two paid inclusion programs -- Search Submit, which services most companies online, and Index Connect, which is for those wanting to list thousands of web pages (like Amazon.com). The engine had three partners selling Search Submit and two partners selling Index Connect. But now the company says there will be "many more partners added" to the roster, which is a good indication the paid program is working.
Also on the good news front, Google reported this week that it has been profitable for the last two quarters. Of course, the company is private, so there is no way to actually verify that claim. The company also has new a CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt. But even though the good news can't be verified, it is still good. And spouting off good news is more than most search engines would dare do right now. So if you've been wondering why engines seem to keep charging more for listings . . . well, all this news should help shatter the mystery.
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