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search program to their own technology, and in September of 2006 announced "Live Search" to the World Wide Web. Searchmsn.com remains the third highest ranked search engine on the World Wide Web as of March 2007.

March 10, 2000 heralded in possibly the greatest challenge that internet companies would ever have to face. The Dot Com Bubble was about to burst! The technology heavy NASDAQ composite index was at its highest level at 5048.62; it was more than double its value from the year before". All the factors were set in place for a major adjustment of the markets to occur and it happened!

As recorded on http://wikipedia.org/wiki/dot- com/_bubble#aftermath: "One possible cause for the collapse of the NASDAQ (and all dotcoms) were massive, multi-billion dollar sell orders for major bellwether high tech stocks (Cisco, IBM, Dell, etc.) that happened by chance to be processed simultaneously on the Monday morning following the March 10 weekend. This selling resulted in the NASDAQ opening roughly four percentage points lower on Monday March 13 from 5038 to 4,879-the greatest percentage 'pre-market' selloff for the entire year.

The massive initial batch of sell orders processed on Monday, March 13 triggered a chain reaction of selling that fed on itself as investors, funds, and institutions liquidated positions. In just three days the NASDAQ had lost nearly nine percent, falling from roughly 5050 on March 10 to 4580 on March 15."

Numerous dot com companies were forced into liquidation or were gobbled up in the next few years in take over bids by larger more financially stable companies. In 2004 it was estimated that at least 50% of dot com companies had managed to survive and were still alive to prove it. To view of listing of search engine acquisitions during those trying years visit: http://seoconsultants.com/sear ch-engines/history . A few changes that occurred during this period are as follows:

September 2000 LookSmart acquires Zeal Media, February 2001 Google acquires Deja Archive, March 2002 LookSmart acquires WiseNut, March 2003 Yahoo acquires Inktomi, April 2003 FindWhat acquires Espotting, Google acquires Semantics, Overture acquires AltaVista and Overture acquires Fast/AlltheWeb, October 2003 Google acquires Sprinks and Yahoo! Acquires Overture.

Thankfully the World Wide Web has survived and is thriving. Search engines technology is actually now having difficulty keeping up to the speed at which web sites and their accompanying data is being added to the Web. The spiders and crawlers are busy trying to handle the increase and I am sure that it is only a matter of time before the search engine wizards figure out a way to insure that they do.

www.google.ca
Google corporate information
www.news.com
http:// en.wikipedia.org
http://www.sea rchenginehistory.com
http://mem exsim.sourceforge.net
www.seoco nsultants.com
www.cs.cornell.ed u/info/department/annual96/beg inning/salton.html
http://about ask.com
http://www.cra.org/crn/ htm/9511/people/none.12_1_t.sh tml

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