Three Internet search engines—Yahoo!, Lycos, and Excite—all went public in April 1996 and began the process of transforming themselves into Internet portals. Yahoo!, for example, rolled out many new features and services that were designed to add stickiness. These included a personalization feature called My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Finance, which included investment research, market summaries, and financial news as well as links to stock quotes, company profiles, and similar information. Yahoo!'s strategy was to become a media company, not just a tool for searching the Internet.
Following its initial public offering (IPO), Excite launched a redesigned Web site and added a menu of defined-content categories on its opening page. The new Excite also included reviews and ratings of some 60,000 Web sites. Before the end of 1996 Excite had added a broad array of information and services to encourage Web users to make it their default home page. The site included City.Net, an information service covering major U.S. and international cities, along with news, reviews, directories, and other resources.
After it went public, Lycos redesigned its graphic interface to look like an Internet portal. While it continued to upgrade its search engine, it added features such a city guide to 400 cities. It also established a Club Lycos that created online communities and provided users with merchant discounts. Lycos, following its transformation into Terra Lycos in 2000, became a dominant international portal with 98 million registered users in 41 countries by mid-2001, making it the third most popular online network in the world.
Not all search engines were able to make the transition to portal. InfoSeek, another search engine, also went public in 1996. It developed into an Internet portal when the Walt Disney Co. acquired part ownership for $472 million in 1998. In 1999 Disney purchased the rest of InfoSeek and launched the Go.com portal. Go.com included content from the full range of Disney properties, including news from ABC, sports from ESPN, and children's and family-oriented content from Disney programs. By 2000, however, it was clear that Go.com would not be able to compete with the leading Internet portals. After Disney sustained more than $1 billion in losses from Go.com and other Internet properties, the company announced plans to close Go.com in 2001.
As Web demographics changed, interest in portals grew more intense. By 1998 Internet users had become more reflective of the general population. Portals were seen as a way to meet the broader range of needs that such an audience would seek to satisfy on the Internet. As part of their strategy to reach this new Internet audience, portals became more interested in adding content, and content providers wanted to leverage their content over the Internet. It was such considerations that led a content provider such as Disney to become interested in executing a portal strategy by acquiring a major search engine like InfoSeek and launching its own portal. Similarly, in 1998 NBC spent $38 million to acquire a 19 percent interest in Internet portal Snap!, which was owned by CNET. NBC subsequently combined Snap! with other properties to launch its own portal, NBCi, in 1999.
In 1998 Netscape's portal, Netcenter, was a hot property whose long-term strategy was to reach the corporate IT (information technology) market. It planned to become a trading platform for business customers and add virtual trading communities in such areas as finance and travel. However, the launch of Netcenter 2.0 in mid-1998 added several consumer-friendly features, including new content channels, a consumer-oriented search feature, e-mail, and browsing services. Before the end of the year, Netscape was acquired by America Online in a $4.2 billion stock-for-stock transaction.
Traffic at Netcenter lagged behind that of other portals. In January 2000 Netcenter had 347,000 unique visitors, compared to 37 million for Yahoo!, 26.2 million for AOL.com, 15.6 million for Go.com, 13.8 million for Lycos, and 9.9 million for AltaVista. America Online was completing its merger with Time Warner when it announced it would recast Netcenter as a business professional's portal. In addition to adding AOL features to Netcenter, such as instant messaging and e-mail services, AOL planned to integrate content from Time Warner into the site.
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