The Internet services Excite and Magellan On-Line Guide are merging in one of the first signs that the search engine market is not as lucrative as the hordes of companies swarming around it would like to believe. The parent companies of the services, Excite Inc and The McKinley Group, say that they will combine the staffs of the two search services. The combined services, which together will form the second-largest Internet search engine, are likely to use the Excite name. In a recent survey by Web-Meter, Excite was the third most popular directory on the Web while Magellan ranked 19th. Excite will be offering shares to McKinley for Magellan in a deal worth $18 million at Excite’s current share price. Because the Web has become increasingly cluttered with search engines with no obvious differences between say, WebCrawler and InfoSeek, competition will weed out the weaker combatants and such mergers would seem increasingly inevitable.
