Mergers and Acquisitions

Over the weekend two big business deals have gone through in the search engine sector. First, Yahoo bought up Flickr, a popular photo sharing web site. Flickr is particluarly popular with bloggers as a way to share, upload and save photos.

A more unexpected development was announced this morning as InterActiveCorp, which owns web commodities like Expedia and Match.com, bought the search engine Ask Jeeves. These guys threw down 1.85 billion for what everyone knows is a third rate search engine. I'm sure they plan on revamping it, but who are we kidding? Aks Jeeves is a novelty search engine, not a Google or Yahoo competitor.

But that's exactly what all these different moves come down to. Competition is getting stiff in the search engine world because everyone has seen the joys of Google and wants in. Companies are expanding into areas, buying up other properties, anything to get ahead. What IAC and Yahoo are doing is just good strategy. A strong internet company now needs to tie its string around a few properties, get ready to be bashed by some hard rocks and still hang together.

posted by: DigiDave