Excite.com, an AskJeeves company, why it's a good idea.

If there are any people that use Excite.com as an internet portal, some may not realize that it's a part of the AskJeeves.com search company. I frankly didn't know this because there have been companies that sell a paid inclusion package into Excite, and I'm going to look into that whether that is a waste of money. What is smart is that AskJeeves keeps the portal separate from the search technology or raw search page at AskJeeves. Whoever intended to keep them apart made a good move, because portals while still in use, are becoming bothersome. The Excite web portal is still highly customizable and for those of you like portals, Excite works just fine.



With a search engine like AskJeeves that is an excellent source of search results, why don't they dump the portal? They could throw more money into R&D for a better search engine. Not that they don't, but focusing on what you do best is always a good corporate strategy. That's why so many of these search engines, even Google, are spreading themselves too thin, too wide. You can't be all things to all people and no matter how many companies make that mistake for all to see, others will still do it. Focus, focus, focus. What they do best and how they can make it better is what search engines need to do.

I suppose it will never stop because human being believe that just because they succeed in one area, that they can apply the same principles in another, even one they know little about. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn't. What happens more often than not is that companies get some revenue stream from something like an Excite, so they can't dump it and the revenue. So it keeps on going long after anyone is "excited" about it.

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