Portal mania rages unabated. Excite Inc has carried forward plans for world search engine domination by signing with the world’s fifth largest telecommunications carrier, Telecom Italia, for a portal site at http://www.tin.it. The non-binding Memorandum of Understanding between the two companies provides for an Italian- language search engine based on Excite technology. Telecom Italia already owns Italy’s largest internet service provider, TIN, as well as a content production company, Stream. Excite, which already comes in Australian, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish and British flavors, yesterday signed with SinaNet to produce a Chinese-language search engine (CI No 3,423). Where next? Laos? Paraguay?
