High tech watchers who delight in corporate infighting and cutthroat competition are glued to a shakeout in the Internet search engine and directory market. In the race for dominance among the Big Five players, Infoseek and Digital's AltaVista may soon be shaken to the bottom.
While Yahoo!, Excite, and Lycos have cemented their top positions via strategic partnerships, and CNET's search.com and Wired/Inktomi's HotBot have successfully carved out niche markets, Infoseek and AltaVista have dabbled in several areas but dominate none. Worse, Infoseek has been beset by management turmoil: the company replaced CEO Robin Johnson with former CNN Interactive executive Harry Motro in May (Johnson stayed on as a consultant), then lost its COO/CFO and vice president of advertising four weeks later. And the big guns at AltaVista suffered a setback when parent company Digital aborted a planned spin-off and IPO. Infoseek and Digital are now praying that when the shakeout ends, the Big Five won't have become the Big Three.
ELECTRIC WORD
Search Engine Shake Out
