Yahoo acquires Overture

[Evil Chris]

Here's the article:
http://www.content.overture.com/d/US.../jul03ts.jhtml

As a user of Overture, I think this is good news. We all know that traffic from Yahoo is gold, and always has been. Now the clicks that I purchase from Overture will be even more qualified and valuable. Nice!

[NetRodent]

Its a further sign of the consolidation of the search engines. Yahoo bought Inktomi earlier in the year and now they have Overture, which recently bought Fast and Altavista. With the exception of Google, Yahoo now owns all the major crawler based search engines. They're sitting on a lot of search technology and patents.

So far Yahoo hasn't announced exactly what they're going to do with all of their new acquisitions, but it seems likely that they will ditch Google in favor of one of (or a blend) of Inktomi, Fast, or Altavista and integrate Overture's bidded listings more closely with their results. Hopefully they will fully syndicate Overture's adult listings to all the sites in their network, but I have my doubts.

Also Yahoo is now the sole supplier of results to MSN (Overture/Inktomi) and Lycos(Overture/Fast). I can't see MSN continuing to support their competitors for long so I suspect this will lead to some major reorganizations in the search engine world. I'm guessing that by next year, we'll see the big four portals powered something like the following:

Yahoo:
Merit listings via Inktomi (maybe Fast or Altavista)
Paid listings via Overture
Directory listings via Yahoo

MSN.com
Merit listings via an in house crawler they buy or develop
Bidded listings via Findwhat.com
No directory

Google.com
Merit listings via Google's crawler
Bidded listings via Google's Adwords
Directory via dmoz

AOL:
Merit listings via Google's crawler
Bidded listings via Google's Adwords
No directory

This reorganization should turn the major portals back into actual search engines as each of the portals (except AOL) will have their own merit and bidded indexes. What will this all mean for Overture? They'll almost certain lose MSN, but it could be more than made up for by greater inclusion at Yahoo.

[SykkBoy]

Thank goodness, Overture was horrible, trying to get certain keywords and their reviewers to approve anything sucked big time

[Evil Chris]

NetRodent... looks like I asked the right person to comment on this acquisition. Thanks for the very informative reply.

Originally posted by SykkBoy
Thank goodness, Overture was horrible, trying to get certain keywords and their reviewers to approve anything sucked big time

Sykk... you are so right. It's a bitch to get anything adult listed with Overture unless you follow their rules to a T, and even then you usually need to ask them twice or more.

[fraggle]

MSN.com
Merit listings via an in house crawler they buy or develop
Bidded listings via Findwhat.com
No directory

They are already testing a new bot at the moment and im sure they will ditch the rest for their own!

MSN uses Overture, Looksmart (directory results) and Inktomi as the back end.

I think it will move to a mix of their new bot results and looksmart (who operate a PPC scheme too).
It will be interesting to see if MSNsearch can aquire anything themselves - i think it would be blocked personally.

MAkes it all a bitmore interesting...

[Kris]

Originally posted by SykkBoy
Thank goodness, Overture was horrible, trying to get certain keywords and their reviewers to approve anything sucked big time

it'll be interesting to see what happens now. i hate their fucking editors. we don't even use them for adult right now, just some non adult stuff. such wankers. i've spent too much time on the phone w/ them to have them basically tell me to fuck off. grrr. and the worst part about it, when they decline, all they say is content. i did have a guy tell me sometimes editors get bored and just randomly pic and choose (wish i had it on tape).

*ok, hit a sore spot here w/ me - could go on for hours but i won't*