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It's a good thing Yahoo Taiwan bought Wretch.cc last year: the Web site, which offers free blogs, picture and video posting and other applications to users, just swiped the top Internet ranking on the island away from its owner's portal.

Wretch.cc was ranked the top Web site in Taiwan in a top-100 list tabulated by Business Next, a local magazine, and Taiwan's Access Rating Online (ARO).

Talk about a big victory.

Yahoo Taiwan's portal has been the top site by hits and unique visitors in Taiwan since its US$146 million all-stock purchase of Kimo.com in December of 2000, the most popular portal on the island at the time.

Yahoo added a number of features to draw new users, including an English-Chinese dictionary, stock listings and other features. It's also been ranked as the top local destination for online auctions.

But despite Yahoo's best attempts to keep up with new features such as blogs, Wretch.cc continued to grow and gain popularity. It proved such a difficult battle that Yahoo Taiwan finally used cash to end the battle, buying Wretch.cc for an undisclosed sum. Local newspaper reports valued the deal at NT$700 million (US$22.7 million).

Yahoo Taiwan came in second in the ranking overall, but it remained number one against other Internet portals.

Rounding out the top five overall Web sites in Taiwan, PChome Online came in third, Yam.com ranked fourth, and Gamer.com took fifth place in the Business Next/ARO list.

The U.S. version of Google ranked first among search engines, and 14th overall, while Google Taiwan came in second, China's Baidu ranked third and video search engine Flurl came in fourth.

In video posting sites, Taiwan's I'm TV beat out YouTube for the top spot in Taiwan.