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mayor - 3:36 pm on Nov 2, 2000 (gmt 0)
On the website side, profits are more fleeting than ever for many of the web businesses, and the pool of high-risk investors has dried up. What we are about to witness is a massive shaking out of the SE business. The survivors must, and will, fit into a viable financial business model, not only for themselves but for the websites they want to tap for funding. We are also seeing the creation of a void for search technology that is inexpensive or free to many non-profit websites. Some great minds are probably working this out now ... a superb new technology that harnesses the web without all the expensive overhead of big staffs of people and massive data bases, mega-servers or server farms, and mega-bandwidth. Napster did this for sharing of mp3 files. Who will do it for sharing of web information?
Ink wants money from websites to stay in the SE business. Yahoo wants money. Looksmart wants money. Google now wants money for top listings. GoTo wants money. Alta Vista is re-organizing to become profitable (ie get money from everyone too). Excite, Web Crawler, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek (Go) are not grabbing for money ... and they've already degenerated to somewhere between dysfunctional and dead.