The news that InfoSpace will acquire TaxACT for $287.5 million came as quite a surprise to industry observers who were shocked to learn that InfoSpace still exists, let alone has $287.5 million.

Once a high-flying darling of the dot.com bubble, I'd just assumed that InfoSpace had long taken its well deserved place in the Internet fossil record alongside such colossal local failures as Brigadoon.com and Home Grocer. So learning that InfoSpace still lives was kinda like hooking a coelacanth.

But what does InfoSpace do? Naturally, I Googled it. And apparently, InfoSpace runs vintage metasearch engines like Dogpile and Webcrawler... URLs I last visited about the time I upgraded from my trusty old copy of Mosaic.

So could somebody please explain to me by what dark magic InfoSpace manages to cling to life?