Tiscali - a European major contender?

now providing Fast search

[heini]

Today Fast announced another big deal [fastsearch.com] - providing websearch for Tiscaliīs European portals. This seemingly didnīt raise much interest. Tiscali, though as major ISP present all over Europe, is a rather underestimated player.

So, who is Tiscali? Originally a leading Italian telecommunication company, Tiscali went for European internet access providing with the acquisition of Datacomm in Switzerland, Linkline and Interweb in Belgium, Nikoma in Germany and A-telecom in France, and later Worldonline, Addcom and LibertySurf.
Tiscali actively pursues broadband technology by building a 30,000 km European fibre-optic backbone, which will connect over 100 European cities by the end of 2001. The goal is to provide customers throughout Europe with a full range of services: voice, Internet and audio/video streaming.
Tiscali operates portal sites in the following countries:
Belgium
Czech Republic
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom

Greatest reach they have in
France, where they are #5 with
2,403,656 unique visitors/October 01
Italy, where they are #4 with
3,566,675 unique visitors/October 01
All in all Tiscali claims over 13 million unique users everyday across Europe.

Tiscali up to now used itīs own searchengine, Janas. Probably the company decided Janas quality wouldnīt be sufficient to compete against Lycos.Europe portals.

[heini]

Just a short addition:
Tiscali says all their European portals will continue using their Janas searchtechnology for local searches. Fast results are only displayed for worldwide search.
http://investors.tiscali.com/com_stampa_en/cs_70_comunicato_uk.html [investors.tiscali.com]

[Rumbas]

2 words:
BAD NEWS :(

Would have been soo much nicer if inclusion through Fast would include inclusion at all of the Tiscali.Europe portals.