Yahoo switches to Google

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From: Mark Baker (mark.baker@canada.sun.com)
Date: Mon Jun 26 2000 - 14:05:33 PDT


http://yahoo.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2152392.html?pt.yfin.cat_fin.txt.ne

Interesting news, but this snippet peaked my interest;

"To soften the blow of its decision, Yahoo said it will use Inktomi's
search technology in its new Corporate Yahoo. Launched today, Corporate
Yahoo is the company's attempt to sell customized versions of its
service to corporations for internal use. "

Was that Yahoo's decision, or was it Google's?

==snip==

Inktomi's stock price and its reputation as the leading Internet search
provider took major hits today when Yahoo said it will switch to a
rival search service, but the company's bottom line may not suffer the
same fate.

Inktomi's shares plunged as low as $113 this morning when Yahoo said it
will begin using start-up search provider Google for its primary search
engine. By the close of regular trading, Inktomi was down $25.31, or 18
percent, to $115.06. Yahoo fell $6 to $119.31.

Analysts agreed that the announcement may have hurt Inktomi's pride, but
they said the implications for its revenues and profitability are mild.
While the company is well known for its search technology, that side of
its business is a money loser that has increasingly played second fiddle
to its exploding networking services division. The search market in
general, meanwhile, remains a low-margin, commodity business even as it
has been swarmed by hungry competitors like Google.

Dick Pierce, Inktomi's chief operating officer, said Yahoo represents
less than 2 percent of Inktomi's overall revenues. Losing the portal as
a
search licensing partner, he said, will have "little impact with respect
to profitability."

Inktomi develops Web search technology that companies can license for
their sites, with clients including America Online, Excite@Home,
RealNetworks, Microsoft Network and NBC Internet (NBCi). The company
divides its revenues and operating results primarily into two buckets.
Portal services such as search account for 40 percent of its revenues.
Networking services, which help make content delivery over the Internet
more efficient, make up 60 percent of revenues.

In the last quarter, the company posted its first profits of a penny a
share, largely on the strength of its networking services, which posted
operating income of about $2.8 million. Portal services, by contrast,
posted an operating loss of about $5.6 million, according to a
Securities and
Exchange Commission filing.

Yahoo's announcement underscores the shifting competitive landscape
among search providers and marks a significant coup for Google. Since
its founding in 1998, the Silicon Valley company has lured many early
Web adopters to its service and has garnered attention from its
competition. Just last month, Web search veteran AltaVista launched
Raging Search, a slimmed-down search engine aiming to lure back
sophisticated Web users who have migrated to Google.

"Yahoo selected Google because they share our strong consumer focus,"
Jeff Mallett, Yahoo's chief operating officer, said in a statement.

The portal attracts one of the largest audiences on the Web, and
searching remains one of the most popular functions on its site. Like
Inktomi,
Google will provide search results to queries that span beyond Yahoo's
human-edited directory.

Yahoo will begin using Google's technology within the next 30 days.

To soften the blow of its decision, Yahoo said it will use Inktomi's
search technology in its new Corporate Yahoo. Launched today, Corporate
Yahoo is the company's attempt to sell customized versions of its
service to corporations for internal use.

Inktomi's Pierce said the company has an "opportunity" to recoup its
search revenues with the Corporate Yahoo arrangement.

Although the revenue shortfall will not significantly drag down
Inktomi's earnings, losing a high-profile client such as Yahoo may hurt
the
company's image as the search technology of choice among Net
heavyweights.

"Clearly this is a blow to their prestige," said Peter Ausnit, an equity
analyst at Prudential Securities.

Despite Inktomi's lead in licensing search technology to Web sites, more
players such as Google and Direct Hit have emerged in its rearview
mirror. Many of these new competitors are offering more relevant search
results and licensing their technologies to major sites.

Google is backed by some of Silicon Valley's most influential venture
capitalists, including Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers. Founded by Stanford University graduates, its technology ranks
results based on the popularity of a site; a site's popularity is
measured
by how many other sites link to it.

Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz serves on the boards of both Yahoo and
Google. Silicon Valley power broker John
Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, is also a Google board member.

Despite Moritz's board role in both companies, Google CEO Larry Page
said the link between the companies did not
play a significant role in today's announcement.

"It's good for both companies in terms of comfort to have a shared board
member," Page said. "But companies tend
to do what they want to."

Direct Hit has also taken market share from Inktomi. Last year, Lycos'
HotBot search engine dropped its longtime
relationship with Inktomi to make Direct Hit's technology its default.
In January, Ask Jeeves, a search engine that lets
people ask questions online, acquired Direct Hit to provide a broader
set of answers to customers.

Web sites such as Yahoo primarily use search technologies as a backup
for queries that go beyond their own directories. For many Yahoo
users, the deal shuffling will barely be noticeable.

"I think this will be (as) completely transparent to users as Inktomi's
relationship (with Yahoo) had been," said Patrick Keane, an analyst at
market research firm Jupiter Communications.

MB


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