AltaVista Withdraws Public Offering

Friday, January 12th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) â€” AltaVista Co. has withdrawn its application for an initial public offering of stock, nine months after the company postponed it because of poor market conditions.

AltaVista began as a search engine in the mid-1990s, and later spent more than $100 million to build the site into an multifaceted portal along the lines of Yahoo! Inc. Those plans were abandoned last year, when AltaVista â€” which has yet to turn a profit â€” decided to return to its original mission.

``Our intention is to be publicly traded, but it will be dependent on recovery and stabilization in the Internet sector,'' spokesman David Emanuel said Thursday. The IPO application also needs to be changed to reflect the company's renewed focus on searches and licensing of search technology, he said.

AltaVista is mostly owned by the Internet incubator CMGI Inc. of Andover, Mass.

Shares of CMGI were up 46.9 cents, or nearly 10 percent, to close at $5.19 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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On the Net:

http://www.altavista.com