In a not-so-surprising turn of events, Yahoo! is buying Inktomi for $235M.
There has been a lot of discussion both outside and inside the company about search engine competitor Google, so clearly Yahoo! is doing this to stay competitive in the search space. Whereas Yahoo! has something like 74 different properties in 25 countries, Google does one thing and they do it well. But search is an important part of a portal. Very important. And Yahoo! knows this, or it wouldn’t invest a pile of cash.
I just hope that this acquisition goes smoothly. Peter Lynch wrote in One Up On Wall Street that after a M&A goes through, the new combined business is usually worse off than if the two companies had remained separate. And I think Yahoo!’s track record has been better than average. On the one hand GeoCities seemed to go pretty well, but whatever happened to all that great content from broadcast.com?