Search engine news w/e Mar 21, 2003

• Mar. 21, 2003

There has been some news this week with search engines.  Not as big as past weeks, but still some interesting things.

 

Inktomi shareholders recently approved the sale of their company to Yahoo.  You may remember that Yahoo made a bid to buy Inktomi before Christmas last year.  They had to wait until a recent shareholders meeting for final approval.

 

Ted Turner is still upset with AOL/TimeWarner over the merger with money losing AOL.  He is pushing the company to sell off AOL.  His estimated losses in value because of the AOL merger in 2000 are estimated to be around $7 to $8 billion.  There has been speculation that Turner would resign from the board of directors of AOL/TimeWarner as he has been busy selling stock in the company since he resigned as vice chairman back in January.

 

MSN announced this week that they are beginning a subtle refocusing of the portal away from being a full service ISP and focusing more on providing portal services.  This is primarily due to the decrease in new users of dial up access and the increase of broadband internet access.  They have also pushed back the launch date of their new DSL package, which they created with partnership with Verizon.  The deal was to begin providing MSN 8.0 bundled with Verizon’s DSL broadband service.  Speculation is that MSN pushed the deal back because of the slow adoption of broadband in the US.

 

Also this week, it was announced that for the first time since the inception of the internet, there have been very almost no new dial-up connections.  High speed connections continue to grow however.

 

Finally, news that the top 100 traditional advertisers increased their online advertising budget to 30%, that’s double what it was just 2 years ago.  Traditional advertisers are those who prefer news radio and television advertising to web based advertising.  This increase in online advertising budget reflects these companies acknowledgment that the internet is a viable advertising alternative to traditional sources.

 

Rob Sullivan

Searchengineposition.com

The Search Engine Positioning

specialists