Ask Jeeves Buys Excite.com

[Garrett]

The ongoing search engine war just got more interesting.

Search provider Ask Jeeves announced today its plans to acquire Interactive Search Holdings, one of the largest privately owned online media and search companies, in a $343 million deal that is part of the company’s efforts to strengthen its grasp on the steadily growing search market.

Last December, comScore Media Metrix reported that Interactive Search Holdings was the ninth most visited United States property on the Internet. The company was launched in 1999 and is commonly known as “the Excite Network.”

Ask Jeeves will double in size with this acquisition, which includes web properties such as the search engine Excite.com and iWon, among others. This news comes after the announcement that Ask Jeeves will drop its paid inclusion program.

"The acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings will be an important step in Ask Jeeves' growth strategy,” said Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowitz. "This acquisition will enable us to combine Ask Jeeves' proven strengths in user experience, search technology and brand development with Interactive Search Holdings' strengths in distribution and direct marketing. By leveraging these two complementary approaches to search, we expect to accelerate Ask Jeeves' market share gains in 2004 and beyond."

[janeth]

It sounds like Jeeves wants to get into this war.

[WebMetro]

It will be interesting to see what they do with iwon.com and excite. Maybe they will add Teoma to them?

[DanThies]

It will be interesting to see what they do with iwon.com and excite. Maybe they will add Teoma to them?

That would seem like an obvious step. The next question is, do they keep running Adwords or roll their own PPC? I don't think they're big enough, even after adding all that, to go their own way in PPC just yet.