A search engine also will continue to operate on the page, under an accord in which Disney receives the search function in exchange for the traffic it sends to GoTo.com. When a search topic is typed into the engine, the results are displayed on a page cobranded with both Go.com and GoTo.com. Disney said it won't make further financial investments in the portal. The surprise decision comes just two months after Disney said it would lay off 400 workers, shutter its money-losing Web portal and sell off assets, including Infoseek. At the time, the company claimed it was narrowing the focus of the Go.com Web site to concentrate on entertainment and leisure, but the reality was that Disney was far behind such rivals as Yahoo! Inc. in the general-interest portal race and may never have been able to catch up. The tortuous history of Go.com and Disney's Net ambitions is dominated by two Internet strategies that are now decidedly out of fashion: Web portals and tracking stocks.

In late 1998, the Net landscape was dominated by portals - sites built around search engines and offering an ever-expanding suite of additional services, from news to chat to free e-mail, in an effort to attract surfers and keep them on the site, a strategy that was seen paying off through advertising revenue and e-commerce opportunities. Making a late push into the market, Disney partnered with Infoseek, an also-ran search engine, to bring its Web brands under a common umbrella.

Disney brought its marketing muscle to bear, launching a massive promotional push that touted Go on ABC, ESPN and in theme parks. But despite such efforts, traffic at the anchor Go.com site remained sluggish.

In July 1999, with the Nasdaq surging, the must-have Internet strategy was a tracking stock, seen by old-economy powerhouses as a way to "unlock value" and catch the Internet wave of surging stock prices. In a complex deal, Disney agreed to buy majority control of Infoseek - it already owned 43 per cent of the company - combine it with its own Internet assets and issue a new stock to track the operations. The move was designed to help the company keep pace with competitors by letting Disney offer stock options in a Net company and giving it an Internet-based currency with which to make deals and partnerships in the fast-moving Web industry. But Go.com remained stalled; in early 2000, Disney said it would narrow Go.com's focus and revamp the site. The new Go.com was rolled out in September, but Disney's portal luck remained about the same. As if all that weren't enough, Go.com was dogged by an embarrassing legal saga in which Disney was outflanked in court by a smaller rival, Pasadena's GoTo.com. In 1999, thelittle search-engine company filed a federal lawsuit against Disney alleging that Disney's Go Network logo, which featured a green traffic signal, infringed on its own logo, which also featured a traffic signal. Disney was slapped with a temporary restraining order barring it from using the logo, a decision that required Disney to yank the logo off billboards, Web sites and television commercials and told by a federal judge that GoTo.com was likely to succeed on the merits of its claim. Last May, Disney agreed to pay GoTo.com $21.5 million and not to use its old Go logo. So far, at least, neither company's traffic-signal logo is displayed on the new Go.com page.

The Wall Street Journal