The handwriting was on the wall.

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I first mentioned About.com in these pages six years ago. A couple of years later I noted that the site was undergoing a fundamental change in its marketing strategy, gearing itself away from general information, and toward consumer-oriented information. Even then it seemed to be an inevitable trend, and not only because sites had to break even, but also because indexing, even the expert, topic-specific, indexing that About.com excelled at, was becoming a gargantuan task. In that column I suggested that a future Boidem column should deal with this basic strategic change in searching. Maybe this column is partially an attempt to do just that.

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Go to: Actually, I wouldn't know, or
Go to: The tyranny of search.