Netscape Communications Corp will announce today that it has acquired NewHoo, a web directory built by a community of volunteer editors. The purchase encompasses NewHoo’s intellectual property and its underlying tools. Netscape will hire the five founders. NewHoo was launched as GNUHoo in June, but controversy over its right to the GNU title, a Free Software Foundation trademark, led to the change of name. In spite of this inauspicious debut, NewHoo now claims it has 4,600 volunteer editors and 100,000 URLs indexed. The editors retain copyright in their own work but the company owns a compilation copyright to the entire site. For us, the attraction is a directory which is ramping faster than anything we’ve seen in this area, said David Beckwith, director of search and navigation for NetCenter, we believe it’s the only model that can truly scale with the internet. When the acquisition is complete NewHoo will be renamed again, this time as the Netscape Open Directory. One version will reside on the Netscape-sponsored open source software project site, Mozilla.org. Another version will be placed on NetCenter itself. Beckwith says the plan is that NewHoo will eventually become the primary directory within NetCenter. There are all sorts of neat opportunities for integration, he said, for example, our Smart Browsing feature allows users to type in search query to URL box. We can direct that query against Open Directory. Because each page of Open Directory will owned by Netscape, eyeballs should stick to NetCenter longer, justifying higher ad rates. It’s no accident that NewHoo is modeled on and named after the market- leading directory, Yahoo. Combining that brand with the current cachet enjoyed by open source might just give Netscape’s portal ambitions the lift they need. What about the volunteer editors whose labors built the site from scratch in the last five months? They seem pretty excited, said Rich Skrenta, former CEO of NewHoo. It means a lot more exposure for their work. People trust Mozilla and think it’s a great project. Early returns look pretty good for the editors embracing this. The next big question in portals is whether Yahoo’s army of paid surfers can compete with thousands of NewHoo contributors working for love alone.
