T-Online fires Infoseek.de

Partnership untill the end of 2001

[oLeon]

Yes,
itīs true: the owner of 25% of Infoseek doesnīt want to continue the partnership with Infoseek as their SE on their homepage.

read article here in german [kress.de]

[rencke]

Aha! The long awaited announcement. And not just any 25% owner, but the one that offers Infoseek.de right on Germany's most visited home page. This explains a lot. Note that the contract expires at the end of 2001. That's why T-Online has been forced to put up with an inferior search service all this time - the complaints from WmW's German members have been many during this winter.

So, what will T-online offer their users next year? Fast? Google? Something else? And can Infoseek.de live on without the huge traffic volumes provided by T-online - Europes biggest ISP?

[oLeon]

I forgot to say:
T-Online will sell its 25%-share, too.

Iīd like to say, there are only two players in the circle now: FAST and Google, and one of them īll take the place of IS. And I assume itīd be Google because FAST is a part of the lycosnetwork.

[heini]

Wow! Amazing and sad news!
Amazing, because this SE is as dead and rotten as it is important -
sad, because it will occupy t-onlineīs portal for this whole year: quite a long time in webbusiness

[rencke]

>And I assume itīd be Google

Yup. And I am betting a six-pack that you are right. Any takers?

[heini]

For the very few non-german speakers out here :) a rough translation of the article pointed at by oLeon:
"Pink Honeymoon crashed! Holtrop to get rid of Infooseek.
T-Online Boss Thomas Holtrop ends partnership with Infoseek-Boss Joachim Kreibich. The contract, under which Infoseek acted as the exclusive searchengine on the internet providerīs portal will not be prolonged. Also T-Online gets rid of itīs 25% share in Infoseek. This might be the end for Infoseek.
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T-Online ends partnership with Infoseek. The retreat of T-Online, the biggest Internet Provider in Germany, might be the end for infoseek. The reason for T-Onlineīs retreat lies in chairmanīs Thomas Holtrop new multi-media strategy. This strategy concentrates on cooperations with content providers, like "Bild.de"(site of one of the most popular newspapers in Germany). T-Onlineīs interests in Infoseek amount to 25%, other partners are Disney(25%), Axel Springer(Publisher, "Bild" and others)(25%), and Holtzbrinck(MediaCompany, "Rowohlt", "Fischer" ) (25%). In March, Infoseek had 72,5 Mio. Pageimpressions, most of them came from the t-online portal. Presently there are negotiations between the four partners on the future of Infoseek. Especially Springer is interested in a permanent relationship with T-Online: the company has earned big money from selling ads with the SE."

This last passage is a bit confusing: How can one partner have earned more money with infooseek than the others? Also this suggests, final decisions have not been made on wether infoseek remains beeing the SE of choice on T-Online portal. Then why should they end the partnership?
Anyway, I hope you get the gist!

[rencke]

>Springer is interested in a permanent relationship with T-Online: the company has earned big money from selling ads with the SE.
>How can one partner have earned more money with infooseek than the others?

Sales commissions can be a very big thing if you are successful and Springer very likely has one of Europe's biggest advertising sales departments, if not the biggest.

T-Online has Europe's biggest single audience. They certainly don't want to jeopardize that by offering substandard services.

I see two possible scenarios here:
a) T-Online chucks out Infoseek and opts for (probably) Google.
b) Infoseek.de owners agree on new technology - (probably) Google. Unless Disney has commitments elsewhere, there would then be a European Infoseek with Google on board.

[heini]

Okay, but why would T-Online sell their shares and still opt for sticking with infoseek as SE on their portal?
I agree with oLeon: infoseek will be dropped
in favour of -probably- google

[grnidone]

I am curious: how were the search results on Infoseek until now?

-H

[rencke]

>sell their shares and still opt for sticking with infoseek

If Infoseek.de changes technology from UltraSeek to Google. The German partners own 75% of Infoseek Germany, so they can probably control that - if they can agree on it. And Disney may well be a disinterested party by now.

Grnidone: According to our German members, Infoseek.de stopped spidering new sites sometimes early last fall, or even before that.

[oLeon]

from my reply in the spider forum:
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Marvin/1.0 is the new spider from Infoseek.de because the old one (infoseek-sidewinder) is not fast enough.
The new one hits your site up to ten times a second, and it does a deep crawl (not that deep like FAST or Google, but it does).
Unfortunately IS has many problems with its index, it DOES need new hardware, the place within its db is absolutely full...I directly heard this from a employee of IS.
So Marvin spiders the net, but itīs not possible to get this new pages into the index of IS. Strange.

That could be a reason why T-Online donīt want to continue the partnership with IS: as an owner of IS T-Online has to pay a lot for the new hardware, and itīs well less expensive to pay Google for its results.
----------------------------------------------------------
>Springer is interested in a permanent relationship with T-Online: the company has earned big money from selling ads with the SE.
>How can one partner have earned more money with infooseek than the others?

Oh, the company that sells the ads for IS is a 100% subsidiary company of Springer.

[heini]

rumbas has provided a link to an interesting article [handelsblatt.com]
It confirms the interest Springer has in Infoseek, suggesting that Springer might buy T-Onlineīs shares.
Furthermore the articles speculates on T-Online planning to develop an own SE.
So we might become a revived Infoseek without T-Online AND a brandnew SE on Germanyīs most visited site!

[oLeon]

...but T-Online denied [handelsblatt.com] all of this!

T-Online says itīs all just speculation, there is no reason to sell its share.
Furthermore confirm all other partners to continue their partnership.