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AltaVista buys Raging Bull
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November 29, 1999: 4:25 p.m. ET
Acquisition aims to bolster company’s personal-finance services
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Adding to its growing line of services that that go beyond Web searching, Internet portal AltaVista said Monday it would buy Raging Bull, a financial discussion and information site.
AltaVista, one of the Internet’s first search engines, is majority owned by CMGI Inc, with Compaq Computer holding the minority stake.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said it plans to buy Raging Bull through a stock-for-stock trade of the privately held shares of each company. Further terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Raging Bull -- which also has received funding from CMGI’s capital arm, @Ventures - is an Andover, Mass.-based startup firm that provided real-time financial information to individual investors through its Web site at www.ragingbull.com.
After the deal is complete, Raging Bull will maintain its Ragingbull.com site while integrating its complete content offering into the AltaVista Live! Money channel, which is the first channel to debut on the recently unveiled AltaVista Network.
AltaVista -- which touts itself as having the Internet’s largest index, comprising 275 million unduplicated pages spanning 90 percent of the Internet’s Web sites -- in recent months has been redefining itself, offering services that go beyond its core capabilities as an Internet-search engine.
One of the reasons Raging Bull and AltaVista decided to join forces is to be better able to compete with rival Web portal Yahoo!, which has an extensive offering of personal-finance information services, according to Stephen Killeen, Raging Bull’s president and chief executive.
And with the company’s focus on real-time user messages that are posted on more than 10,000 dynamic discussion boards, the AltaVista Money channel should be able to give Yahoo! a run for its money, Killeen said.
"The thing that sets us apart from everybody else is the number of messages that are posted on our site,” Killeen said in an interview with CNNfn.com.
"We are a place to go for people to find out what’s going on with a stock, even when there’s no news about a stock,” Killeen added.
Raging Bull, which currently boasts more than 1.7 million users, posts more than 30,000 messages per day, according to Killeen.
The combined service will provide users with real-time message board postings, coupled with real-time news and real-time quotes, Killeen said.
"We believe the combination of both companies will supercharge AltaVista's already meteoric growth and provide users the best one-stop resource for financial content, community and discussion on the Internet,” he said.
In afternoon trade on the Nasdaq, shares of CMGI (CMGI) were up 16-3/8 at 163. Shares of Compaq (CPQ) were up ½ at 25-1/8 on the New York Stock Exchange. 
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