Go.com

[Meme]

Re: Meme, I think you may be right! Not quite, but....

How'd you like to invest in Infoseek, again? This story gets weirder and weirder by the day. Jet found this story on CNET, you are not going to believe your eyes:

The second coming of Infoseek?

By: Jim Hu, CNET News.com
3/13/01 4:35 PM
Source: News.com
Search engine Infoseek, which Walt Disney acquired and refurbished into its ill-fated Go.com Web portal, may not be dead after all.
A group of 25 former employees of Go.com are trying to acquire the rights and technology behind Infoseek, according to one member. The group wants to revive Infoseek and bring it back to its roots as a Web search pioneer--without Disney's help.

"We were doing the numbers, and we knew it would be a profitable enterprise if we focused on search," said Bernt Wahl, a former senior manager at Go.com. "The Infoseek brand name is still well known on the Internet. If we can recreate that, we think we have a niche market."

Should the deal go through, the group would obtain the rights to the Infoseek brand name, its www.infoseek.com URL, and some of its servers.

The acquisition attempt comes after Disney quietly revamped Go.com and replaced its Infoseek search feature with pay-for-placement search engine GoTo.com. Disney also reduced its staff by 400 employees in January. At the time, the entertainment giant said it would shut down Go.com to take itself out of the portal race largely dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and AOL Time Warner's America Online.

Wahl, who was laid off in January, would not disclose how much Disney has asked for Infoseek, but he hinted it would be much less than the company had paid. In 1998, Disney spent $70 million for a 43 percent stake in Infoseek, which was a publicly traded company. By the time it shut Go.com's doors, the company incurred a $790 million write-off for the depreciation of its intangible assets related to the portal.

Much more and well worth the read at:

http://www.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-5126121-0.html?tag=ltnc

Hey, they could enlist Steve Kirsch as an investor, and he could do a backwards screw job on Disney paying them pennies on the dollar for Infoseek! Then he could reinstitute his postion as Chief Geek in Residence, we could all slap each other on the butts, and officially rename this year 1997! <VBG>

Meme