SEARCH123 ANNOUNCES TRAFFIC PARTNER REFERRAL PROGRAM AS NEWEST EXTENSION OF PAY-FOR-PERFORMANCE MODEL

Aggressive, Limited Time Effort Boosts Referral Bounty to 10 Percent In Bid to Increase Traffic Partners; ISPs, Hosting Companies Targeted

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. (January 16, 2002) - Keeping its focus squarely on performance, Search123 (www.search123.com), the industry's first real-time commercial search engine, today announced an aggressive, limited-time Traffic Partner Referral Program that guarantees referring parties a recurring 10 percent payout -- up to eight times greater than that offered by Search123's leading competitors.

Under the program, a site referring a potential traffic partner to Search123 will receive 10 percent of the revenue generated from that relationship, on an evergreen basis. By contrast, Search123's competitors pay traffic partner referrers anywhere from a one-time bounty of $25 to an evergreen revenue share of 1.5 percent.

In addition to portals and merchant sites, Search123's new Traffic Partner Referral program is aimed at Webmaster resource properties, especially mid-tier ISPs and hosting companies. Search123 is seeking to add pay-per-click keyword search to the various essential tools that ISPs offer their customers -- from e-mail utilities and intrasite search, to headlines/news and banners -- and thereby help drive quality traffic to customer sites while providing a useful commercial search utility to users. Affiliates are encouraged to private label Search123 search boxes.

Search123 is an auction-based commercial search engine that provides qualified leads to online merchants who bid on keyword searches. Under Search123's CPC (cost-per-click) model, advertisers list their sites, bid on keywords relevant to their site and manage their advertising campaign in real time. Keyword-based searches originate from Search123's network of content-driven Web properties. Searchers review site titles and descriptions prior to clicking on a listing, thereby pre-qualifying the click. Advertisers pay their bid amount only for clicks generated by a pre-qualified visitor. Search123 has attracted thousands of search partners, generating more than 30 million searches -- and six million paid introductions -- monthly.

"This program is a reflection of our belief that everything in our business must be performance-based," said James Beriker, CEO, Search123. "We're profitable as a company because we're careful about how we grow. Rather than dilute our energies with a huge sales force of questionable value and ROI, our strategy is to empower our existing partners and very aggressively share revenues with them, to drive traffic partners to us. For referring parties, there is zero downside risk -- they get paid well when they deliver.

"We've got a better proposition for traffic partners than our leading competitors," Beriker said. "We're ready to grow rapidly, and this is how we plan to do it. Our merchants benefit from performance-based advertising, our partners benefit from performance-based referrals -- and we benefit from performance-based business development."

About Search123

Based in Westlake Village, Calif., Search123 (www.search123.com) is a commercial search engine that enables merchants to list their sites, bid on keywords, and manage their online advertising accounts -- all in real time. By creating aggressive revenue sharing relationships with Web properties with a strong base of qualified users, Search123 has been able to cost-effectively and profitably drive increasing amounts of highly-targeted consumers to its advertisers Web sites while creating a strong supplemental revenue opportunity for its search partners. Search123 is part of the essential shift in online advertising that has embraced the concept that performance -- and the ability to deliver meaningful return-on-investment for advertising clients -- must be the industry's focus.