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PARDON ME FOR GLANCING at the calendar so often. But you see, I just can't shake this sneaking suspicion that it's 1999 all over again.

See, I spend my days now writing about search marketing and online commerce — something I plan to do more of in this column. But six years ago, I was immersed in writing about the other end of the network: the pipes and plumbing that the telecom, cable and broadband companies were installing, and the service providers that were making this brave new world of frictionless e-commerce possible.

Back then, the landscape changed once every two weeks. Come up with a new way to make money, and you'd “invented a new paradigm.” Layering on new services and features meant discovering a “next-generation solution” — better than the last generation. After all, it was newer.

Plenty of useful work was done in those days, of course, and direct marketing has been among the beneficiaries. High-speed broadband was pushed out to almost half the households in the United States. Internet protocol was adapted as a platform for both voice and video transmission. Other programs and protocols made the Web the most interactive and usable marketplace of ideas and products the world has ever known.

But as we now know, all that light came with plenty of waste heat. A lot of sins were committed in the name of synergy, and a lot of business models floated stock on the basis of nothing more than an e-prefix before their name.

The thing is, it all made good sense — on paper. Broadband was going to transform the way people shopped, communicated, worked and thought. The old phone companies were ripe for competitive pressure. Web sites that did one or two things very well morphed into portals that did 10 or 20 things pretty well, even if it wasn't entirely clear how they'd turn those new customers into new revenue.

Why dredge up these painful dot-com memories? You tell me. Search is today's “transformative” technology, one that will change everything people look for on the Internet. Online auctioneer eBay is paying a super-premium price for an IP voice platform. New technologies (blogs, RSS, mobile applications, enhanced search) are flitting around looking for a profitable place to land. Google and Yahoo! are in a perpetual arms race to add more sticky features and keep ad revenue growing. Rumors abound: Of Yahoo! becoming a media company; Google adding Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) service; and Microsoft teaming with America Online for the — wait for it — synergy.

There's a lot of new venture capital floating around looking for the Next Big Thing and hoping to find it in search. A recent print article reported that this past August was the most active for IPOs in five years, many of them small tech companies with big dreams but thin wallets. In August, the initial public offering of Baidu — China's most popular search engine, and the sixth most visited Web site in the world — gained 353% on its first trading day. In September, a secondary offering put another $4.35 billion into Google's coffers.

Granted, this year's exuberance is nowhere near as irrational as the '99 model. Search engines have shown they can turn consumer attention into profits; it merely remains to be seen how far they can stretch the model. And investors may have developed some capacity for short-term memory: The Baidu offering that shot through the roof in August lost 23% of its value one September day after a couple of poor analyst ratings.

But everyone plays in the same market, and the merger-and-acquisition behavior of the segment leaders eventually can force others to follow suit. With Google and Yahoo! setting the pace, it would be easy for second-tier search companies to feel they have to get big or go home.

It would be a shame to see the young search industry suffer the same boom-and-bust fate that befell broadband five years ago, through the same combination of hype, hubris and hunger for short-term revenue.

I don't want to go back to 1999. I can't find my Razor scooter, I hated the Pets.com sock puppet, and if I hear “Livin' La Vida Loca” one more time, I'll freak.