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For example, take a look at Lycos. Over the last six months, Lycos has gone from another boring search engine listing inaccurate results to a provider of many different services. Of course, Lyco's main job still is to be a search engine. But with the recent acquisition of Tripod (which lets you join "Pods" and create free home pages), plus the recent additions of chat, e-mail, news, and more, Lycos has turned into much more than a search engine.
Another example is Excite. On Excite's front page, you can find links to news, free e-mail, weather services, and the like. There's also Excite's PAL messaging service, not to mention chat.
Even Altavista has jumped on the bandwagon, offering free iName e-mail.
The point is, though, that it seems like most of these search engines are trying to distinguish themselves from each other by offering more and more services to Internet users. The problem is that instead of distinguishing themselves from each other, they are instead blending into identical service providers, at least to the average Internet user.
In the end, however, I feel that the search engines should spend more money on what they are: search engines. Although nice extras like free e-mail are welcome, in the end, great search engines without services, such as HotBot, could prevail over more feature-laden but more inaccurate competitors such as Lycos.
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