Laredo Investment Corporation Announces Major Acquisition of Web Search Technologies Inc.

Business Editors

LAS VEGAS, Nev.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 18, 2000

Laredo Investment Corporation (OTCBB:LRDI) is pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement to purchase 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of privately held Web Search Technologies Inc. and its next generation Internet information search technologies.

Web Search Technologies, Inc. will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Laredo and will operate independently with its own Board of Directors and management team. This acquisition represents a significant business penetration into the information technology (IT) industry by Laredo. The terms and conditions of the agreement will be released after review by our attorneys for SEC compliance and approval.

Web Search Technologies Inc. was founded by Dr. Mengchi Liu, one of the world's most influential scientists in deductive databases (the core science that underlies the foundation of the next generation Internet search engine operation). Dr. Liu is well known in academic and IT industry circles for his pioneering work on Web Model and Inference, advanced databases, and object-oriented technologies.

As a worldwide open forum for information exchange, the Internet has been essentially structure-less since its inception in the early 1990's. The multiplicity of content and the complexity of content relationships have become an overwhelming obstacle for average Web visitors to find relevant information from millions of websites. The majority of queries with most existing web search systems would result in a tedious list of completely irrelevant websites. In most cases, an average Web visitor doesn't understand how to describe his/her interest in a way that is precise enough for a search system to find a small collection of useful information.

Since the introduction of Yahoo!, many attempts have been made in improving search performance. One recent example is Google, which was recently adopted by Yahoo!. While Google and others like it rely on some ranking systems that help to exclude irrelevant information, Dr. Liu and his team are tackling the challenge from a more fundamental aspect. By using a set of proprietary and state-of-the-art techniques for data organization and search operation, Dr. Liu is able to embed structures or orders into the Web, making the Web information more organized and inherently searchable. This is what will make the next generation Web search engine outperform existing search engines. It will make searching the Web easier, faster and most importantly, more accurate.

"The success of the next generation Internet information search technology lies in the ability to organize and manage the Web data around the world." Dr. Liu stated. "The significance of this is similar in comparison to IBM's monopoly of hardware technologies in the 1960's, and to the later domination of software technologies by Microsoft. It is about the handling of content."

As a result of its acquisition of Web Search Technologies, Laredo is entering into an aggressive development phase for this new generation Internet information technology. This phase will include the building of a core technical team comprised of the world's leading scientists in database and information retrieval; protection of the intellectual assets via a set of patents; recruitment of the senior management board; and the continued launch of this intensive development project.

About Laredo Investment Corporation

Laredo Investment Corporation is a public company registered in the State of Nevada (Symbol:LRDI OTC:BB NASDAQ). Laredo also owns GFR Nutritionals, which is a wholesale vitamin and nutritional supplement manufacturer. GFR is also working on nutritionalsdirect.com, which will be an e-commerce nutritional site providing a line of nutritional supplements worldwide via the Internet.

Certain of these statements contained in this press release may be deemed forward-looking statements. Such statements, and other matters addressed in this press release, involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Among the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements and matters are the risks and other factors detailed, from time to time, in the Company's reports with the Securities Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, the Company's Annual Reports on Form 10- and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.