Two of the Web's top 10 sites are to merge: search engine Lycos (www.lycos.com) has bought free Webspace provider Tripod (www.tripod.com) for $58 million in stock.
The move came last week as Wall Street was buzzing with reports that Netscape is considering selling some or all of the company, and is talking to America Online (to buy its popular Web site), Sun, Oracle, and IBM.
Tripod is the fifth fastest-growing Web site in the world, with nearly one million members and currently adding a further 100,000 a month. Lycos claims the deal will make it the fifth most visited of all Web sites.
The Tripod-Lycos deal will have ramifications for both companies' existing alliances. Lycos includes a facility to search for "Personal Homepages", and until last week this was basically a search of GeoCities' free pages (in return, GeoCities would point users to Lycos for searches).
Lycos's search engine now pinpoints Tripod members' pages, which seem to have been automatically catalogued since the deal was announced.
Another twist in free Webbased services is the launch by Usenet search engine DejaNews (www.dejanews.com) of a test version of its Web-based newsreader, which operates similarly to Web freemail accounts.
Meanwhile research about free email services shows large gaps between claimed membership numbers and users who actually log on at least once a week. Microsoft's Hotmail claims 10 million active users, though only 30 per cent use it at least once a week, according to the research by Cyber Dialogue research.
Other findings are that only some 5.4 million adults say they have only one free email account so a large number of accounts are multiple, further inflating figures. Half of all Hotmail users are female. Since Microsoft's purchase of Hotmail at Christmas, it has geared up for tests this week on a new version of its start page.