The four biggest search sites, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek, all saw their share prices increase an average of 390% over the course of 1998.37 All of these various players, as they feverishly pieced together features to compete in what were called the “portal wars,” went a long way to creating the competitive froth that would set the stage for the dot-com bubble. Before dot-com IPOs were an everyday occurrence, the portals, with their ballooning stock prices, were able to fork over big money (at least on paper) to construct their arsenal of user features.
