CMGI Acquires AltaVista

[Dilbert] was the first to send out the word that CGMI has officially purchased Alta-Vista from Compaq. The two companies also formed a "strategic" partnership-whatever that means. CGMI wants Compaq's muscle behind their portal site, and Compaq wants to stop bleeding money. Total purchase price: 2.3 billion dollars. Sheesh.

Comments

Anyone else but me notice...

[Anonymous Coward]

That, suddenly, **every goddamn search** on AV returns with the first hit from AMAZON.COM or their lame ass auction site? Go give it a try.

Bastards ruined a cool engine.

they own lycos too

[djinn87]

they own like 10% of lycos too. don't really know what that means, but i thought it was interesting enough.

-matt

Re:they own lycos too

[Dan Soto]

FYI...
2.3B did not entirely by Alta Vista. It only bought them an 83% stake in the company.

% of DEC?

[vallee]

Based on this valuation, can we estimate what percentage of Digital the Altavista property genuinely represented? I think it's amazingly high (considering what a huge company DEC was in the first place.) -Paul
--

Re:% of DEC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compaq paid 4.5 billion USD + 141 million Compaq shares for Digital. At the current value of Compaq, that means that the total value of the payment NOW is about 7.8 billion, which means that Altavista was valued at approx. 30% of what the stocks and cash Digitals shareholders got is worth now.

WHO The Hell is CMGI

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone can tell me who is CMGI ..
What is the Full name .. and do they have a WebSite..

Re:WHO The Hell is CMGI

[Anonymous Coward]

CMGI is sort of a mutual fund company that purchases stake in net companies and then turns around and takes them public for a huge cut.

Re:WHO The Hell is CMGI

[[Dilbert]]

Well, you could try their website at http://www.cmgi.com, for starters.

Value?

[paul7e]

In a fair world, Slashdot would have sold for 2.3 billion, and some Alta Vista would be on the board at Andover.Net...

Our little society doesn't do a good job of valuing things.

Re:Value?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone can convince Rob to sell off Slashdot, I'm sure he can get enough to last his lifetime. Even if Linux becomes a footnote, Slashdot will go on being just almost as popular just as "News for Nerds."

How's the IPO coming Rob? 8-)

jeezus

[hogwaller]

Did anyone notice that when Compaq announced

that AV was for sale, it improved?



I use google these days anyway.

--------------------------
Your Favorite OS Sucks.
^D

Re:jeezus

[blue]

I like Google because it has no ads, but it doesn't offer all the features that I've been used to with AltaVista. For example, you can't even search by phrases in Google (99% of my searches). Yeah, I've noticed they improved, too. No porn ads in searches!

wow... that$ a lot

[Sun Tzu]

Is it just me or is the scale of these net.mergers unfathomable? Didn't Excite go for about $7 billion? Meanwhile, I heard that the market value of the big one, Yahoo!, recently exceeded that of General Electric. Altavista is not even clearly 2nd tier anymore, as best I can tell -- maybe 2.5 tier.

Well, there go my plans for a hostile takeover of Yahoo! ;)

Re:wow... that$ a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that MS hasn't yet overtaken GE AFAIK, I think that is hardly likely. GE is MASSIVE, with more revenues than most of the fortune 500 combined.

Re:wow... that$ a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

MS blew past GE last year.
Absolutely insane, but that's America.

Re:wow... that$ a lot

[sql*kitten]

Is it just me or is the scale of these net.mergers unfathomable?

It would be if they were actually spending real $, but it's mostly stock swaps, which are worth billions on paper, but don't map back onto any sort of assets.

Oh Well

[GnuGrendel]

The /. acquisition was the biggest one of the day for a while...


Do you think they timed it this way?

Billionaire Bob?

[Ralph Bearpark]

Oh I dunno. If you can get $2.3 billion for a tired old search engine like AltaVista what do you think Rob & Jeff got for a dynamic & innovative site like slashdot (reaching thousands of dynamic & innovative people like us)? It's gotta be at least $25billion or so, doesn't it?

:-)

Regards, Ralph.

Umm, did you try the link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Libby Dole really does need to make the Internet safe for everyone...

Someone please explain why it's worth anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

AltaVista is all I use because it is so fast and has absolutely no graphics or advertising (at least the pages I use don't). Can someone please explain why that is worth anything to the owner except good-will. That can't be worth more than a few million, can it?

x$ per hit?

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone know how many hits per day altavista gets? Mihgt be interesting to compare the valuations of various web sites on a $/hit basis..

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Alta-Vista /used/ to be my search engine of choice, mainly because of it's accuracy compared to other engines.

It's such a shame to see Alta-Vista lose its technical focus, as it becomes just an economic pawn to be toyed with by the likes of Compaq.

For example, their "RealNames" commercial links shows just how far they are prepared to let down their users with such annoying "features".

I'll stick to my Google from now on. It gives me better results, less ads, and hasn't yes succumb to the fate of Alta-Vista.

oh please

[gavinhall]

Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:

give me a break. slashdot is nowhere near worth what altavista is. slashdot == interesting news site, but nothing essential. altavista == absolutely essential search engine without which nothing could ever be found on the internet.

Re:x$ per hit? [50 mil/day!]

[ellbee]

Yes, I know people there too and those numbers seem to be correct. But are sex-related queries still the most popularity?

Re:x$ per hit? [50 mil/day!]

[Anonymous Coward]

Altavista gets around 50,000,000 hits per day. I have a friend who works there and he couldn't give me real numbers. Some of those are from meta-engines [gotonet, etc]. The thing that's always impressed me is that they're #10 without any advertising. The search engine actually makes money too. I don't think any of the other parts [zip2, shopping.com] do or ever will...

The AV index is still growing

[ellbee]

Last I heard AV had over 250 million non-duplicate web pages indexed, and knew of (but hadn't indexed) several hundred million more. One thing mentioned on the CNBC interview today is that CMGI will continue growing the index, and hopes to have "the entire web" indexed over the next few years, which they think will be over one billion pages.

I believe that the peak query rate is over 600/s,
which means completing a query every 1.5ms. Good thing computers are getting faster, memory is getting denser, and 64-bit addressing is a reality.

How much is AltaVista worth?

[bloodrat]

According to doubleclick.net, which is who leases out the ad space on AltaVista, it gets 1.4 Billion hits per month, which breaks down to something like 46 million per day on average? You can actually check out the price of advertising(and the hit average on listed links) of Altavista at ..

http://www.doubleclic k.net/advertisers/ad_rates/altavista.htm

.. But because of the pricing structure it's impossible to say what their income from it may be. Even if the profit on ad's on their site were marginal, say, one tenth of a cent per hit, thats still 1.4 Million a month. Not to mention the deals they have with RealNames, Shopping.com, and the sales from the search engine.

What Do They All Do?

[hanway]

AltaVista has 475 employees. What could they possibly all be doing? Does it really take that many people to run a search engine, or is it now 10 people handling the search engine, and 465 people responsible for putting shopping, auctions, email, stock quotes, and other junk on their pages to turn them into Yet Another Portal?

They had revenues of $40 million, but that wouldn't even pay everyone's salary.