The net has been seized by portal frenzy, and AT&T Co and Excite Inc are the latest to announce a services and content partnership. Both partners signed similar deals with different partners earlier this week. Between the online service ‘Powered by AT&T’, a Personal Communications Center marketing AT&T products, and a commitment to developing voice-enabled net technologies, today’s three-year agreement between the carrier and Excite is almost identical to the Lycos deal AT&T signed on Monday (CI No 3,403). Nor is Excite any less promiscuous, having won the race to back-end Netscape’s NetCenter on the same day. All parties point out that these are non-exclusive contracts. AT&T especially wants to collect portals, attracted by the demographic profile of users. In March, rival MCI pipped AT&T to the post for the number one web site. Still up for grabs are Infoseek Corp, MetaCrawler by Go2Net Inc and The Mining Co. Portals had better enjoy their day in the sun. A new report from Forrester Research predicts declining hit rates for search engines, followed by a shakeout that leaves only three web portals still standing: Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.
