Netscape Buys Web Page Directory

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

November 17, 1998 (5:20 PM EST)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Netscape has added a 100,000 Web page directory to its Netcenter website with the purchase of NewHoo, Netscape said Tuesday.

Netscape bought the start-up for an undisclosed amount of stock. NewHoo's staff of five are now Netscape employees.

NewHoo, a Mountain View, Calif., company founded in June, has taken an innovative approach to the problem of scaling a directory to the exploding size of the Web. It maintains a network of 4,600 unpaid volunteer site editors. Each editor is in charge of a particular category, adding new sites, removing broken links, and giving out awards for outstanding sites.

This group of editors forms a kind of community, said Chris Tolles, a former NewHoo employee who is now a senior product line manager at Netscape. The directory's model is Usenet, the online discussion-group system which has thrived under the tutelage of thousands of volunteer editors, each of whom is enthusiastic about a particular subject area. NewHoo editors, he said, have already set about a system of self governance, working out conflicts among themselves when site categories overlap.

NewHoo's large numbers of editors let it quickly grow its directory, Tolles said. "If you submit a site to a closed directory, it can take months or years," he said.

The best known closed directory, of course, is Yahoo. Even that Web giant won't be able to keep up with NewHoo, he said, because it has only 80 category editors in its Santa Clara, Calif., offices. NewHoo, on the other hand, has editors in every state and more than 200 countries, he said. This lets it have better international content than any portal competitor, Tolles said.

NewHoo will be integrated into Netscape's Netcenter site within the next month, said Dave Beckwith, director of search and navigation for Netscape. Netcenter is Netscape's portal site, a one-stop destination on the Web for news, search, and Web services.

Over the next four to six months, Netscape will further integrate NewHoo and Netcenter. This will include tie-ins with the Smart Browsing features in the Communicator 4.5 browser. Netscape will continue to work with Excite, which also provides search and directory services for Netcenter.

Some analysts are skeptical about the value NewHoo will add to Netcenter.

"My concern is quality controls, not that the regular directories have been outstanding," said Julia Pickar, an analyst with Zona Research.

The strength of the idea, she said, is that it keeps costs down, but it remains to be seen whether editors will keep their enthusiasm once they become an unpaid component of Netscape's business plan. Improvements in search services through XML and other technologies also might lessen the need for such directories, she said.

Tolles said that NewHoo consulted with site editors before agreeing to sell to Netscape, who felt Netscape's active support of the open source movement was an important factor. NewHoo will have a presence on the Mozilla.org site, which coordinates Netscape's open source editors.