WebProNews

Metacrawler mogul Infospace just added the services of European search engine Seekport to their list of partners. Seekport will get some much-needed monetization and Infospace picks yet another resource to draw upon.

Infospace currently owns the metasearch engines WebFetch, Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. These metacrawlers pull from a number of sources including Yahoo, MSN, Google and Ask Jeeves.

Seekport launched in 2003 as an alternative to many of the U.S. based search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN. This deal should provide them with some revenues to help them develop further.

NetImperative quoted Joachim Kreibich, managing director of Seekport said, "Everybody who decides to use the combination of Seekport and InfoSpace gets access to our well-proven search technology as well as to an optimised portfolio of paid results from all relevant providers of paid search. The customer is independent from any single paid search provider, and enjoys better match rates for paid results."

NetImperative also quoted Dominic Trigg, vice president search & directory Europe at InfoSpace saying: "Seekport offers superior web search results as well as high-end customised solutions like site search and archive search, whilst InfoSpace specializes in monetising search as well as specialised solutions such as pay per call and contextual search."

Whether either of these companies will pursue portal type services like instant messaging, multimedia content and other feaures is unknown but this should help their position if they do decide to pursue those avenues.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.