On Thursday, January 27, 2000, Disney announced their decision to change
the direction of their Go.com from an all purpose portal and search engine
like AOL.com, Lycos and Yahoo! to strictly an entertainment and leisure
destination. This announcement comes on the same day as The U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit repealed the stay [AF 12/7/99] on a previous
injunction that bans the use of Go.com's green and yellow traffic light
logo. Disney was given the stay to allow them the chance to remove the logo
from all their sites on the Internet. The final ruling on the fate of
Go.com's logo will be decided in March. As reported [AF 11/16/99], the
search engine GoTo.com sued Disney for copyright infringement on their
similar traffic light logo. Go.com pres. Steve Wadsworth hopes the
restructuring will allow the site to stand out in the heavy competition for
traffic on the Net and focus on highlighting Disney's entertainment
properties like Disney films, ABC News and ESPN. This decision comes after
Go.com reported close to a US$1 billion loss in 1999 [AF 12/14/99], due
primarily to the purchase of search engine Infoseek.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
