heini - 10:25 pm on Mar 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

>wouldn't you prefer

Altavista, Fast, Inktomi: they sold their engines. ATW's former owner, norwegian based FAST was extremely happy selling their web search unit to Overture, and now is prospering in the corporate search space.
It wasn't big bad Yahoo forcing them to sell. It wasn't a hostile takeover.

What's the logic behind it all? Inktomi, AV and ATW tried to compete in a market where they didn't stand a chance, for various reasons, in the case of AV mostly because of wrong business decisions.

Websearch all of a sudden had become the biggest hype on the web, one of the very few success stories, resurrecting the whole "E-biz" sphere from the ashes.

So what happened was big money came in and small players suddenly found themselfes getting run over by the two big players.
If we are to look for one main culprit for eliminating the competition in the websearch area, than this would of course be Google. In the beginning they were simply better, and when OV had created and pioneered the perfect way of making money out of search, Google was clever enough to emulate that very model and making it even better, striking the perfect balance between selling serps and still aggressively pushing search technology.

In Europe, within less than two years local SEs were nearly completely extinct, replaced by Google. In the US and the UK things were only slightly better.

In this climate Inktomi, ATW and AV realistically didn't see any chance to compete any more. Other players, like Northern Light had thrown in the towel even earlier.
The only company who had the courage, and the cash, earned through OV listings, and the necessary user base, to take it up with Google has been Yahoo.