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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace (INSP): Where GNET went! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Roger Sherman who wrote (14125)	11/17/1999 11:44:00 PM
From: Steven R. Michaud	Respond to of 28311

Picked the following off of Raging Bull (mona was the poster)... BIG NEWS: GNET in TOP TEN Portals: In today's THE STANDARD (Intelligence for the Internet Economy) Portals: Ask Jeeves CMGI Go2Net Healtheon Inktomi LookSmart Lycos Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch VerticalNet Yahoo First there were search engines. Then there were portals ? sites that serve as gateways to a variety of Net services. Yahoo isn't the only one that matters. By Jim Evans The term "portal" is one of the more unfortunate bits of lexicon that the Internet has produced, and it seems to grow less meaningful by the day. There are now vertical portals, corporate portals, consumer portals, e-commerce portals ? all hoping to persuade customers and investors that they're the doorway to something big. But even if the word doesn't mean much, the companies that are flying this flag are among the most important in the Internet Economy. Since many of the portals started out as search engines, we decided to group them into a single category. To get our list of 10 we picked the leading independent mainstream portals (media companies like Disney that own their own portals are in the media category), the leaders in the main portal subcategories and the most popular search engines. Yahoo, of course, is the uber-mainstream portal, the standard against which all others are measured. It fulfills all the requirements: You can find stuff there, you can shop there, you can even e-mail from there. The only other independent portal that can really be compared to Yahoo is Lycos, which earlier this year tried to do a complex deal with Barry Diller's USA Networks that would have made it a kind of consumer e-commerce portal. As it stands, Lycos is on its own and no worse for wear. The other pure-play portals on the list are Go2Net, Looksmart and CMGI. Paul Allenholds about 35 percent of Go2Net and plans to use it as a front end for any future broadband product from his cable firm, Charter Communications. Cox Interactive Services owns 30 percent of LookSmart. And David Wetherell's CMGI now owns a majority stake in AltaVista. Among the so-called vertical portals, none has been as aggressive as VerticalNet. In building vertical portals to satisfy different markets, VerticalNet aims to grab a piece of a wide range of business-to-business transactions. Another type of vertical portal aims to sell goods and provide information for an entire economic sector. Healtheon, which is merging with WebMD and has designs on every aspect of the online medical market, is perhaps the best example of this breed. Also on our list is the leading local portal, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch. With the acquisition of Microsoft's city guides in July, it has some 77 local sites focused on entertainment and commerce. And then there are the search engines. While observers once wondered whether they could survive without becoming, well, portals, several are thriving. Inktomi pioneered the practice of licensing its search engine to other sites, and has expanded into areas like network caching and shopping engines. And Ask Jeeves, with its much-touted natural-language search capability, is following Inktomi's lead on the business-model front.