Bidder's Edge, a Burlington, Mass., search engine for auctions, which gained fame last year when a judge forced it to stop listing eBay auction items, will close its Web site next week and is searching for a new survival strategy.

The 2-year-old startup has a "spidering" engine that trolls more than 200 auction sites and allows customers to view the hottest items in one location. But, unable to generate sufficient revenue or venture backing, this week it posted a sign on its site saying the consumer service will cease next Wednesday.

The 25-employee business, which at its peak had about 35 workers, will attempt to survive by searching for licensing deals for its search and aggregation technologies. An executive said no layoffs are imminent.

Bidder's Edge had its turn in the Web spotlight when eBay, the San Jose, Calif., company that dominates the online auction world, sued in U.S. District Court in December 1999 and won an injunction that blocked it from searching and relisting eBay items.

Bidder's Edge was forced to add a site section that separated all eBay listings, requiring auction hunters to search twice. Asked if the court ruling played a role in the site's demise, chief technology officer Kimbo Mundy said, "That's hard to say with any certainty. We definitely lost some users after we started (separate eBay searches), but I don't know if that played all that large a role."

More significant, Mundy said, was the failure of online merchants to embrace auctions as a revenue source. Some 18 months ago, analysts at Forrester Research said the online auction market would swing from person-to-person auctions -- which, led by eBay, account for two-thirds of Web auction revenue -- to merchant auctions.

Forrester said merchants would take over two-thirds of the auction market by 2002. A year ago, retailers like Wal-Mart, Dell and Land's End made splashy announcements of new auction services. A series of small, vibrant auctions would be fuel for Bidder's Edge and other aggregators, which could gather all of the listings into one site.

But the merchant market has amounted to little, as retailers have backed away from untried and uncertain online strategies. In a smaller-than-expected market, Bidder's Edge has struggled against competitors like Andale, AuctionWatch.com and GoTo Auctions.

Mundy said, "E-commerce in general has consolidated around a few big players, so search engines are not as significant as many of us had anticipated."

The stock market collapse also played a direct role in Bidder's Edge's decline. Last February the company agreed to be purchased by auction infrastructure company OpenSite Technologies, which was planning an IPO. But when the Nasdaq plunged and chilled the IPO market, OpenSite shifted gears and agreed in April to be acquired itself by Siebel Systems, scuttling the Bidder's Edge acquisition and casting the Burlington business back on its own.

Ten months later, the site, which listed more than 350 million items for more than 9 million visitors, is done. Mundy said executives are searching for the best strategy to sell their seach and aggregation tools. "Exactly how we'll package our technology and what marketplace we'll target, we'll have to see," he said.

"We're very sorry to see the site go, but this is what we have to do to have a chance of surviving," the CTO said.