Los Angeles, Jan. 10, 2000 (PRIMEZONE) -- SearchHound, the search engine that made its mark back in 1998 as the net's first "child-safe" search engine, has been acquired by TVI Shop (TSC), a start up network marketing company whose list of board members looks like a "who's who" of the high tech industry. TSC is presently negotiating with a public company to do a reverse merger and thereby have its stock publicly traded. The merger is expected to be completed during the first quarter of 2000.
"The purchase of SearchHound strongly positions TSC as an emerging e-commerce player. The massive user database, high traffic, and low operating costs of SearchHound provide a solid-growth / low-overhead platform for the start up," states Mark Joyner, CEO of Aesop.com.
Joyner is also the Internet Marketing evangelist who led SearchHound to its current level of high traffic (the site currently delivers over 4,000,000 banner impressions monthly and is growing fast) on a deliberately zero dollar advertising budget. "The web has so many zero cost advertising tools built right into it; I'm amazed by companies that throw millions of dollars into advertising on the web only to see little or no results. TVIShop.com is wise to acquire a property like SearchHound as it has been built to grow itself continually on a virtually zero dollar budget. "
SearchHound, while not yet one of the 8 major search engines, has been a key innovator in the industry and is gaining popularity at an amazing clip. SearchHound users, many of whom are loyal to the point of fanaticism, have enjoyed a number of innovative free services for webmasters ranging from an affiliate program (the first search engine to offer an affiliate program) to traffic counting and site search tools.
Aesop.com, an eminent Internet marketing and software firm, and WebGenie Software Inc. (http://www.webgenie.com), a highly respected developer of e-commerce tools jointly developed SearchHound in 1998. The sale of SearchHound is the first deal made by the new e-commerce brokerage firm, VenturePilot.com.