Posted on 03/21/2005 1:16:13 AM PST by nickcarraway
AC/InterActiveCorp, the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc., the nation's fourth-largest search engine company, for about $1.9 billion, according to an executive involved in the negotiations.
An announcement could be made as early as today.
IAC/InterActive owns a variety of Internet businesses. Its principle holdings are Expedia, Ticketmaster, Home Shopping Network, Match.com and CitySearch. Advertising spending on search sites is rapidly growing and Mr. Diller's company appears to be trying to tap into a market dominated by Google and Yahoo.
Most of Ask Jeeves's revenue comes from advertising that appears on its sites through a contract with Google. That contract runs through 2007.
Fourth-quarter profits and revenue at Ask Jeeves, whose brands include ask.com, Excite.com, iWon.com, more than doubled. Net income rose to $17.5 million and revenue rose to $86.1 million from $31.8 million a year earlier.
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IAC/InterActive has 44 million visitors a month to its various sites. CitySearch, one of its holdings, is a network of city guides that provide information on restaurants, bars and events in different cities. By marrying a local-search business with a global search engine, Interactive hopes to benefit from further growth in targeted keyword advertising, the executive involved in the deal said.
As an example, CitySearch customers can specify a certain kind of restaurant, and choose from a list of neighborhoods in the city they have chosen.
IAC/InterActive is expected to acquire Ask Jeeves in a stock transaction, exchanging shares in IAC/InterActive for shares in Ask Jeeves, then buying 60 percent of the just-issued IAC/InterActive shares back for about $1.2 billion.
Ask Jeeves closed Friday at $24.24 a share, and IAC closed at $22.29. The bankers in the deal are J.P. Morgan, Allen & Company and Citibank. Ask Jeeves bills itself as an English-language friendly Web site that encourages users to formulate searches in question form.
Exactly. What on earth gives this company value? The page (if I recall from the two or so times it came up by accident) is embarassingly idiotic.
It must be a sweetheart deal by investment bankers and VC's who own most of the stock.
I have always wondered how many people were dissuaded from MySimon.com by their hideous giant-eyed mascot (before they softened its look).
My buddy worked for them many years ago.
I tried it and I thought it was lame.
Are the advert. revenues worth almost $2 Billion?
My major search engine it is good for asking questions if you ask a question I find it answers it better than google does. For word search I use google.
I tried, and boy did it s*ck.
I tried using it's natural language query and all it would return was advertisments. Useless.
Google better watch out, there is a new open source engine called Nutch, that is pretty good. It uses Lucene (IMHO the best OS tool ever).
Most definitely they are worth $2 billion ....... $2 billion in Diller dollars
Here are the search engine stats from my web site:
2406 Google
704 Yahoo
456 MSN
302 Other search engines
121 Lycos
78 AOL
33 Hotbot
25 AltaVista
8 Netscape
6 Excite
5 Mamma
3 Go.com
3 AllTheWeb
3 WebCrawler
2 Search.com
2 MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)
1 Virgilio
I don't see any ask jeeves.
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