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Go2Net Relaunches MetaCrawler, Extends Metasearch Technologies to Music, Auctions, and International Markets SEATTLE, Jan. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Go2Net, Inc. (Nasdaq: GNET), a network of branded, technology- and community-driven Web sites ( go2net.com ), today introduced a new version of MetaCrawler, the Internet's leading metasearch service, available at ( metacrawler.com ).
In addition to a new user interface and navigation scheme, MetaCrawler now provides users with the ability to simultaneously search many of the Internet's leading music and auction databases, extending Go2Net's core metasearch technologies to two of the Internet's most popular categories. At a time when international usage of the Go2Net Network, and the Internet as a whole, is rapidly increasing, the new MetaCrawler also enables users to customize their searches to return results from specifically requested countries. Initially, this includes more than 25 nations in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
"Today's relaunch incorporates a significant series of improvements to MetaCrawler, which has been dedicated, since its inception, to providing Internet users with access to the most effective and comprehensive search resources available," said Russell C. Horowitz, Go2Net Chief Executive Officer. "As the Internet continues its rapid expansion and diversification, we will continue to extend our core technologies to more effectively search more of the Internet, as well as its most popular individual categories."
-- In the music category, MetaCrawler's Audio/MP3 Search conducts metasearches of several online music partners, including Astraweb, Gigabeat, AudioGalaxy, and MP3 Board. -- For its auctions metasearch, Go2Net is collaborating with AuctionRover.com to provide MetaCrawler users with a comprehensive, categorized and searchable index of more than 35 leading auction sites -- such as eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and MSN, among many others.
Go2Net also announced today that it has added the search engine Google to its roster of search engines, which it queries to obtain search results. With MetaCrawler and Dogpile ( dogpile.com ), which Go2Net acquired in 1999, Go2Net is home to the Internet's two most popular metasearch services.
A July 1999 study by Nature magazine and the NEC Research Institute found that individual search engines are "increasingly falling behind" in their efforts to index the Web and that "a substantial improvement in Web coverage can be obtained using metasearch engines, such as MetaCrawler." MetaCrawler has received numerous industry awards and citations, including PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for metasearch as well as being selected as one of the 'Top 100 Web sites in the World' by the same publication. |