March 16, 2004

Needham-based TripAdvisor Inc. is being purchased by InterActiveCorp, the Internet conglomerate controlled by media mogul Barry Diller. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TripAdvisor manages an online travel search engine and directory, with clients including American Airlines, Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Orbitz, and Travelocity.

In December it was called the seventh most-visited travel web site in the world by comScore Networks, with 5.2 million unique visitors monthly.

"Trip Advisor is a fine addition to both our extensive travel service offerings and our local group of services connecting customers to consumers with targeted information and offers," Diller said in a statement.

"We now have more than 80,000 merchant customers, a number that continues to grow significantly, and believe that the consolidation of these efforts across all our brands will only increase the value to all our marketing partners."

Formerly known as USA Interactive, IAC has accumulated several top web brands in the past 15 months, including Expedia Inc., Hotels.com, Hotwire, Ticketmaster, and Lending Tree.

TripAdvisor was founded in 2000 and received $3.3 million in funding from Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures and private investors. CEO Stephen Kaufer last year forecast $15 million in revenue in 2003. The company said it achieved profitability in the third quarter of 2002.

InterActiveCorp had revenue of $6.33 billion last year.

Source: Yahoo News

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.