Disney and Infoseek ready to take on premier portals

NEWS Infoseek and The Walt Disney Company launched a Web portal yesterday which they claim will outpace Netscape and Microsoft's own offerings. Their claims are based on a report published in July by Relevant Knowledge. At the launch of the portal, the companies used the study to suggest that their site - named the Go Network - "will have the third largest unduplicated reach on the Internet". This would suggest the portal will be more popular that Netscape's Netcenter and Microsoft's MSN, although it would still trail behind leaders, Yahoo and AOL. However, Relevant Knowledge today told Silicon News that the companies have taken its research out of context. "This is not quite true," said a company spokeswoman. She said Relevant Knowledge's studies are retrospective and cannot predict how Go Network will fare in the future, contrary to the alliance's claims. The research group uses a large panel of real users to assess Web activity: "We know what they did yesterday but we can't predict what they will do tomorrow."