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Overture To Buy AltaVista
Nate writes "Overture announced that they bought AltaVista today for $140M in cash and stock. This follows closely on the heels of Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi. Considering the significant financial muscle of Yahoo and Overture, I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead. For those of you who aren't familiar with Overture, they are the 800-pound gorilla in the pay-for-placement listing market. When you search in Yahoo, those Sponsor Matches at the top are provided by Overture."
That's all fine and dandy but Google is still by far the best way to search the web. It has more features than a geek's leatherman and is faster than Superman on speed.
So what if sometimes it dances a lil'bit.
Posting as directed.
But I do know this... They can't make AltaVista suck much more than it has the past few years. It used to be my main search engine back in the mid-90s.
Overture and Yahoo may have more money; however, no amount can make me want to go to a search engine that I can't view in the "Bork!" Language. Bork, Bork, Bork!
The offical press release is here.
my other penis is a vagina
But when's the last time you heard about the latest and greatest offering from AltaVista?
t a. com
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.altavis
Which is it? Is Google a big brother monopolist or a scrappy underdog? I'm confused.
Bring a tear to my eye this news does. It is so 1999 and sweet of them. Brings back found memories of the old new economy. Hopefull all those $200K CFO's from back then will lift a spatula at their current job in honor of this event.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
I don't think this is going to make people switch. People don't automatically use stuff because a company has more money or we'd all be using OS/2 right now. It takes a mix of good marketing and good enough product quality to do that. Neither altavista or yahoo offer the latter anymore, so I'm not at all worried.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Overture should have bought Astalavista...seems they missed on spelling.
Tat Tvam Asi
I can find any word in the dictionary. 100 bucks. How about it?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
An unprofitable Internet company buys another unprofitable business company! Who says the Internet boom was over?
You mean people are still using altavista? :-P
... is the day I stop using them.
Not really a constructive comment, but I'm slightly frazzled at the moment.
Considering the significant financial muscle of Yahoo and Overture, I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead
Well unless Yahoo and Overture intend to pay me to do searhes, rather than the other way around, I'm not sure financial muscle has much to do with it. Google is fast, convenient and accurate. 'Nuff said.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
www.goo ... i dunno, I think goo .. altavista and google.c .. er, Inktomi are going to have a rough ride.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I always said "yahoo-exclamation-mark".
Curtain lights.
This is it.
The night of nights.
No more rehearsing and nursing a part.
We know every part by heart.
and to think many moons ago in 1998 the domain name alone sold for 3.3mil.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
The bigger google gets, the more inaccurate they are. More and more, I just get garbage off of their searches. They'll fall on their own without the worries of new competition.
But after google, the only redeeming feature it had was babelfish -- and now google translates webpages better, too.
Altavista became way too bloated and way too commercial, and it will wither and die away within 5 years. Everything it does, google does, but without the sense of bloat or loading 200k webpages full of ads.
Really... they don't
Google may be the most popular geeks' search tool, but it's not my favorite. I much prefer engines like http://www.vivisimo.com/ and http://www.teoma.com/ and even http://www.alltheweb.com/ http://wisenut.com/ is also a really good engine and gettinng better every week. The best image finder is either http://www.ditto.com / or http://www.picsearch.com/ If you're after music and videos, then http://www.singingfish.com is for you...
thats all Overture are, you know just like those bogus search sites where "casinos" and "finance" seem to be the most popular searches and when exiting you get a flurry of popups, less the popups i dont really see any difference between them anymore, both are just as bad (as all the paid placement search engines are)
the only difference is the offices are larger at Altavista
For those of you who aren't familiar with CoyBoi Kneel, he is the 800-pound ass in the pay-for-play gay film market.
Really, why should you, or anyone else care if Google maintains their lead unless you happen to be employed by them?
If Yahoo! or Overture can produce a better service than Google does, we should applaud them and support their advances. I want the best service possible, I'm not particularly interested in which corporation provides it.
Don't get me wrong, I love Google, and I find new uses for it weekly it seems, but I'm not sitting in front of my computer rooting for them.
They're a business, just like every other business out there -- the only difference is that's it's geek chic to profess devotion to them.
When you search on an Overture site like Altavista or Lycos, the paid matches show up at the top, but they are labeled as "sponsored matches". When you search Google, the paid matches show up on the right, and are labeled "sponsored links". I guess that's a little different, but not by a whole lot. So why is one "pay-for-placement" and the other isn't?
it offers what I want. Advertising dollars, PR efforts, and FUD can only mask an inferior product for a given time. In the end you will always return to the product you feel is better. If you still have that choice.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The only way I would use a search engine owned by Overture is if that HAD happened.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
The BBC states that Altavista once boasted 65M users per month. That doesn't seem very much to me when I use search engines 20-50 times a day, perhaps that may be above the norm but that must have been pre Google. Is there a list of search engine usage anywhere?
The day a seach engine uses "pay for placement"... is the day I stop using them.
Then I guess your search options are pretty limited, huh? Every major search engine now is either hooked up with Overture/Ah-ha/etc, or has their own fee for submitting. Except Google, but some of google's ads appear as lines that look very similar to their regular search results, and are directly above the search results (just like Overture's). The only major difference between how Google places theirs and how Overture et. al does theirs, is Google has a different background color for the ad text, making it a little more obvious that they are ads.
But it's not a huge mental leap to go from "background color" to "no background color", especially under pressure from advertisers, with in an increasingly smaller number of search engines to advertise with.
----Yeah, I know there are more search engines popping up every day. And _you_ know that nobody ever goes to them either. When was the last time you used one of those other 15,000 search engines that all those spammers tell you they'll submit your site to for 50 bucks??
AltaVista is clearly a dying brand as far as web-search goes; is overture just buying it for the traffic?
I forgot to mention that US is still India's biggest IT market but Europe and rest of world are catching on pretty fast...
:-)
And to the dismay of Indian businesses, Indian currency has begun appreciating against USD in spite of government intervention. Eventually Indian workers will lose the cost advantage and then it will be a true global IT world where people will compete based on talent and hard work...
Maybe I am dreaming....
Also, I am all for Linux and I bought my copy of SuSE Linux 8.1 Pro to pay my dues
Once again, don't be picking on my spelling/grammer...
I seem to remember that Altavista could be reached through a host on some old guard company's domain. Anybody have that handy?
I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead.
If anybody else would provide better service, why should you want Google still have any lead if it becomes an inferior technology then?
Just because they have pulled off some nifty stuff doesn't mean they should be a sacred cow.
When men used to be men
I am sorry Altavista used to be cool, in 96 and then google came around, and I would rather use that. Google is Fast, simple, and doesnt have banner ads. I am sorry, I will not use anything other than google anymore. ok maybe Dmoz.org.....I still like google
---
Why? Are you an angel investor?
Seriously, who cares who has the "lead"? As long as I have good search engines to use and they manage to stay in business and pay their people reasonable salaries, I have zero interest in some business horse race. In fact I'd be nothing but pleased if another decent search engine could come along. I dislike being quite so dependent on one (and I am, utterly, dependent on Google at this point). Google is good but their approach can't possibly be the be-all-end-all. Before Google I thought Altavista was pretty good in fact, and right now I'd seriously regret being forced to use it if Google were down or unreachable.
I realise the article is about ad strategy rather than search strategy per se, and I really don't care about the ads as long as I can continue to ignore them. What I don't get is the fanboyism. They're a for-profit company. The fact that they've been very sane and rational in their approach so far is nice and even laudable, but it's not really some supererogatory wonderful act. If they weren't, I'd be that much less likely to use their service. Doesn't make them my teddy bear.
This sure seems like a stupid thing to hope for.
As has been said before, the reliance on Google really scares the hell outta me. Yeah, Google is great now, but shit happens, and shit happening to Google would really ruin me. Half my job security is based on scavenging for answers!
Since no one else seems to be able to compete with them, maybe in the spirit of competition we could talk Google into spining off an Anti-Google?
Woah! I read that as they bought Astalavista(as in .box.sk) for 140M, which is a hellofalot to spend on a very-dark-grey-hat website!
The TE seems to have no problem with people researching the foundations that Tolkien left behind. Hell, there are universities in England that offer courses related to it.
;)
I want to Google in Quenya, Sindarin, and possibly the Black Speech, darn it.
To add more to my junk post (my stories never get posted anyway), here's another article I just read:
WiFi Internet Access in village using Open source and a bicycle
How about this?
Overture, curtains, lights,
This is it, the night of nights
No more rehearsing and nursing a part
We know every part by heart
Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, you'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it
Tonight what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it
What's Yahoo!? Is it anytyhing like Google? Just kidding. But seriously, even thought AltaVista was once a great search engine (remember when Digital ran it?), you'd pretty much have to clone Google to compete with Google. Pay for placement just isn't in the cards these days.
While I understand the mechanics of business, I would much rather, say, donate a few bucks to a good search engine, than have one provided for nothing, that serves up results, not due to good ratings, or useful information, but rather how much they were paid.
I get advertising when I drink my god-damned coffee (suppliers names plastered all over my mug), when I watch a movie ("James Bond -Franchise Another Day" anyone?), etc..etc.. I don't _want_ it shoved down my throat when Im searching for relevant information. Its hard enough sifting the crap from anything useful already.
I thought that in this case the search engines are the sellers (selling, in this case, search result placement) and the merchents were the buyers. Having fewer sellers would give more leverage to the remaining sellers.
Taking the situation to the logical extreme, if there was only one search engine, that engine, call it Google, can tell merchants "we will use background colors to prominently denote ads, take it or leave it"
That really hurt! -CoiB^H^H^H^HCowboy Neal
Oh yeah, and AltaVista has Babblefish, that's cool too.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
When you care to search the very best in unranked and non-shilled data. Anything else is just...well, you know.
goggle can suck my post-hole digger
Another offtopic:
IT Industry Set To Be Linuxed
From the article,
"...any IT company ignoring Linux does so at its own peril....
Quoting the IDC prediction on Linux as the fastest growing operating system in the world, Nasscom points out that India too is waking up to the reality of Linux. The open source movement is making strides in India with the developer community in the country evincing tremendous interest in the Linux platform...."
Frankly, I think that they still have a lot of catching up to do. I find some of the most remarkable pictures of Jessica Alba and Brintey Spears in 3 seconds of searching on images.google.com - thumbnails and all. Thousands of them. I don't know how Altavista can ever concieve of contending with that.
I want to Google in Quenya, Sindarin, and possibly the Black Speech, darn it.
Those three languages use tengwar as their native writing system. Tengwar doesn't even have a Unicode block (but it's proposed), let alone support in Windows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since I've seen a lot of posts addressing Google (usually along the lines of Best browser in the universe), I'll post a few interesting Google links:
http://www.google.com/options/ (googlize every aspect of your life)
http://labs.google.com/gviewer.html (for us lazy people)
http://labs.google.com/keys/index.html (who needs a mouse?)
http://catalogs.google.com/ ( Shopping at stores -> Shopping with catalogs -> Shopping online -> Shopping with catalogs online (What is this world coming to?!?!))
Google is the best (It seems to be the general concensus) not only in speed/results, but also in development and creativity.
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
Same damn post, but I'm not so god damn lazy.
Google may be the most popular geeks' search tool, but it's not my favorite. I much prefer engines like http://www.vivisimo.com/ and http://www.teoma.com/ and even http://www.alltheweb.com/"> http://wisenut.com/ is also a really good engine and gettinng better every week. The best image finder is either http://www.ditto.com/ or http://www.picsearch.com/ If you're after music and videos, then http://www.singingfish.com is for you...Just randomly clicked on this pic on your home page. That looks like a dude's face on a gal's body...
AltaVista used to be the best search engine; it's strength lies in basic text searching and it's incredible speed and scalability. Unfortunately it did not account much for the interlinked nature of the web and was easily subverted by web author tricks. These faults were mostly solved by Google.
However, just as Google offers a stand-alone embedded box, the Google Appliance, for use within corporate intranets, I suspect that is an area where AltaVista's technology could thrive much better.
Intranet searching and indexing is still a rather underexploited market. There's basically Microsoft's Index Server, flaws and all, the Google Appliance, and several good but not great minor choices such as ht://Dig. If we could get an AltaVista appliance that ran under Unix (or at least not bound to Microsoft) and underpriced the Google Appliance I would have to believe that a lot of companies would take notice.
google doesn't have to worry. I haven't used anything except google in ... i can't even remember how long. No one i know uses anything except google. My room mate uses yahoo for fantasy football, but he's lame, and he has nothing better to do that and playing wc3.
not because its owners are stinkin rich (are they?)
Buying out a company that everyone hates for handling ads won't make you more respected.
In other new, my company has decided to buy out Microsoft. We hope that this will help us in our global domination plans.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Unicode contains merely the lower sixteen bits of the UCS (Universal Character Set), aka ISO 10646. UCS defines a 31-bit character set; the lower 65534 positions, which Unicode dupes, is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) or Plane 0. Tengwar and Cirth are defined in the full UCS table, along with the complete Hangul Jamo and both Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Han kanji.
Specifically, Unicode is one possible Level 3 implementation of ISO 10646. All characters have the same indices and names in both standards; the Unicode spec merely adds formatting and rendering semantics for languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and standardizes algorithms for sorting and comparison. (That last bit is the most important, since ISO 10464 is little more than a very large table.)
Another offtopic:
Existence of God can be derived from equations
This one, too.
This person is obviously attending some sort of Academy for Chicks with Guy's Faces.
AltaVista was a weird alagam of old-school DEC engineers [like in their late 50s old-school], Bay Area tech folks and East Coast MBA frat weenies. It was a deadly combination.
Rod Schrock and his Harvard b-school buds [his old roommate was one of our VPs], fresh from creating the Presario group at Compaq fled the sinking Compaq ship and headed for high ground in the Bay Area with dollar signs in their eyes. Knowing nothing about the Internet and what it meant or the realities of media business they decided to go after Yahoo instead of continuing their dominance of the search arena. They bought two absolute dogs [Zip2.com and shopping.com which was about 10 days from bankruptcy], then lost most of their product development team to another startup [where Louis Monyeaux (misspelled)] had just gone to. Undaunted, Schrock and friends dumped close to 100 million dollars total into the ill-fated "smart is beautiful" version of AV. A lot of that money went to USWEB CKS and Weidman Kennedy, $6 million for the overblown "launch event" in New York and the rest went to unqualified employees.
A few months later [spring 2000], the market really starts tanking. CMGI pulls AV's IPO for the third time and things get really stupid. The smart employees start leaving and the idiots take full command. Several months later, Schrock is finally booted by CMGI but the damage is already done.
I'd like to adknowledge the people who actually did their jobs and did them well during that period, namely the Search Engineering and Search Product Management groups [well, most of them but I won't name names here]. They were the ones who made AV great and fought futiley to keep it good. Fortunately, many of them landed at good places [like Barry at Google] but it was a long, unpleasant journey.
He is not obviously new here, look at his membership number, he's quite clearly less new than yourself. Check your facts clearly next time, and you won't need to post possibly some of the most outrageous assumption based, fact-less twaddle since the last time a bush decided to speak.
You remind me of a version of Eliza, someone says something, you reply with a stock remark, you show no flair, no imagination, just a poor impression of a dead parrot, at least they have the ability to shut their mouth before they start to think about what to say.
Unicode contains merely the lower sixteen bits of the UCS (Universal Character Set), aka ISO 10646. UCS defines a 31-bit character set; the lower 65534 positions, which Unicode dupes, is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) or Plane 0.
You're confusing Unicode with UTF-16. Unicode covers the entire defined UCS code space: "the Unicode standard and ISO/IEC 10646 now support three encoding forms that use a common repertoire of characters but allow for encoding as many as a million more characters."
But here's something I'm curious about, from the same page:
For example, a group of choreographers may design a set of characters for dance notation and encode the characters using code points in user space.
Doesn't dance notation require just four characters, left down up right?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seems the big fish eating the smaller ones syndrome is back. The search engine market is going on two scales - commerical or research oriented.
Google is the only search engine that has a good and right mix of both and thus is manaing. And their core business is searching unlike Yahoo, Overture etc. whoes core is business centric (shopping, search key word sales etc.)
As long as the big companies maintain to keep their search engines research oriented, they cannot win the game. or survive in the near future
Why would i search with Yahoo now that I've finally the url to google :P
Huh? Search for legal advice on Google -- the top placement is paid for.
Overture isn't the 800 lbs. gorilla if you're comparing them to Google. You people have to get off this "Google Dot Org" thing, and understand that Google is big pay-click player and huge revenue maker.
Is that the hand, the elbow, the shoulder, the neck, the ankle, the knee, or another piece of anatomy that is moving up/down/left/right/forward/backwards?
DDR dance notation represents the approximate location of a body part that touches the ground at any given moment. Like medieval neumatic notation, DDR dance notation makes a suggestion on which the performer improvises, inserting various "freestyle" moves such as handplants, knee drops, and the like.
Yes, I know that more exact notations such as Labanotation exist, but I was just trying to be difficult ;-)
Will I retire or break 10K?
From the blurb: "When you search in Yahoo, those Sponsor Matches at the top are provided by Overture."
You mean you can search in Yahoo?
A lot about search engines lately. I think the obvious winner has already won and now only griping and complaining accompanied by cheerleading (see .sig for details) and smiling remains.
It's like the browser wars, but it hasn't been beaten to death . . . yet
Google keeps their site clean and fast. They cruft it up as little as they reasonably can. Yahoo is a clot. Overture who?
If you have not stop using Altavista.com Now here Good reason to Never user this Search Engine ever again. Also i Imagine This will put the final nail into CGMI Coufen. Pud should be SO Proud. Now if Idealab would just die off.
Bablefish is provided by Systrans (a French company), yet I don't see Overture offering anything like it.
So maybe Systrans signed an exclusive with Alta-Vista and maybe thats what the big attraction is.
Google is improving its translation, so Overture has to match. I don't see anything else in Alta-Vista thats worth the money.
Yup, you read right. A lot of the time I can't find what I'm looking for at google.. but I can find it at teoma.com :/ - comeon google, you used to be better!
Hopefully this can be a chance for Altavista to regain some of its previous wonderfulness that was squandered by the dot-commies. It might not overtake Google as the Ueber-search, but it would be excellent to see it rise from the ashes.
DEC -> digital -> altavista -> overture... geez.
Ogliopolies are alive and well.
Overture: Just dont fux0r with BabelFish !
Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to buy the software? Oops, I'm thinking of Astalavista.com
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
Google? Love em, but uneasily keep waiting for the other shoe to drop when they stop wanting to burn cash (which one would think they must be doing a lot of). When do the suits take over?
freeadvice.com paid for that search result? Or are you referring to the sponsored banner ad at the top that is from prepaidlegal.com? If you're referring to the latter, I've learned to just ignore that top spot since it's usually a banner ad and go on to the "real" search results. Even then I don't usually pick the top one or even the top 5. Sometimes I flip to the third page just to see what's around. Google still is much better than the alternatives.
I agree completely. Who cares if they have more money?????
Why? If they have more competition, they'll be more inclined to do whatever they can to increase the quality of their search engine to keep people coming back. And they obviously care, because the quality is how they got those people to begin with.
Whale
Emacs is better for starting a flamewar when everyone else is agreeing that vi is better. There are some things even vi can't do.
Infuriate left and right
but some of google's ads appear as lines that look very similar to their regular search results
They do not. They look nothing like search results. Beside the background color you mentioned, there are the words "Sponsored Link" next to it. PLUS the format is totally different (text ad line larger than normal, then normal size line with url and a small bit of information on the site). A normal search result has the page title (in a smaller size than the ads), then 2 lines from the page matching your search, then for some sites a description and category from the Directory/DMOZ, then the url with the page size, sometimes the date indexed, and usually the cache and similar links links. To me anyway, they look nothing alike.
CMGI is up 15% this morning. I bet they are glad they were able to unload Alta Vista.
I still don't understand what Overture is getting for $140 million. Isn't Overture in the pay for placement business and not the search engine business. Has someone told this to management? This seems like a mistake. I guess I need to send them a used copy of F'd Company.
But it's not a huge mental leap to go from "background color" to "no background color", especially under pressure from advertisers
It IS a huge mental leap to start deliberately confusing your users and eventually losing them. And when that happens, the advertisers leave you too.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
June 1999: CMGI buys AltaVista from Compaq for $2.3 billion in stocks.
"On Tuesday [the day after the sale], CMGI closed at $110.31, up $12.63, or 12.92 percent, with 13,921,400 shares traded.
'It's a great deal for them [CMGI],' says Ullas Naik, analyst with FAC Equities. 'AltaVista is an underappreciated and underused asset. CMGI can leverage that and cross-pollinate it with their existing companies and then they'll probably be able to spin it off as an IPO in six to nine months at a significant premium to what they paid.'"
December 1999, AltaVista files for IPO. (DEC had made plans to have AltaVista go public in 1996, but recanted the following year.)
April 2000: IPO delayed.
"CMGI was enjoying a midday bounce of nearly 6 percent to $55.13 [half of what it was not one year before, mind you]."
January 2001: IPO withdrawn.
"[During 2000, chief executive David] Wetherell's CMGI shares fell from a value of $2.1 billion at the beginning of the year to $100 million at year's end, a 95 percent decline."
I wouldn't worry about Google. It's made grown men cry. All over their worthless stocks.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Google limits your queries to 10 words or less, does not have wildcards (letter, not word) or stemming and its boolean options are limited to phrase, OR and "word wildcards".
When I (admittedly rarely) hit those limits, I turn to AltaVista.
What does the fact that the parent post got moderated +4 Informative (to a total of +5), without adding one iota of information to the AC post it followed, say about the SlashDot moderators?
Altavista attempted to do what seemed like the obvious thing, and what most search engines did early on: it attempted to make hard searches easy.
Google's brilliant innovation was to do something far more useful, but less obvious: it attempted to make easy searches easy.
Put another way: Altavista competed with other search engines; Google competed with your bookmark file.
Back in 1996-97 I used to live by my bookmark file. Far fewer companies had actually managed to get hold of their company names as domains, important sites were tucked away in nonobvious places, and just finding what your were actually looking for was such a relief that you felt some real urgency in bookmarking the site and remembering how you got there.
In that time Altavista could almost always get me where I wanted to go, but often I have to look on page 2 or 3 of their search results for something that should have been on page 1.
Then came Google. Sure, the Web had evolved, and companies had figured out how to get their sites onto more intuitive domains. But mainly Google did a great job of making obvious things easy to find. Their "I'm feeling lucky" button is by far the link on the Web that I click on most often. I still have a bookmark file, but I hardly use it. My bookmark file loads only slightly faster than Google, it's less complete than Google, and frankly listings are in a more useful order in Google than they are in my bookmark file.
But let's not lose sight of the fact that early on in their competition, Altavista was _better_ than Google at what Altavista was trying to do. It's just that Google was trying to do something more useful. When it came to really hard searches -- looking for a particular file name used within a particular Linux device driver source tree, or looking for an old classmate when all you have is a very common last name, a place they used to live, and a hobby they used to have -- Altavista beat Google hands down. And no one to this day has an advanced search syntax as sophisticated as what Altavista had, despite the crappy (and undocumented) interface.
No, at the time that their Raging Search was launched, their best attempt at a Google competitor, they were better for _hard_ searches.
Google had gotten better, even at the hard searches, and Altavista hasn't been maintained. But this is a sad day.
The opportunity is still out there. Google will continue to win the competition with my bookmark file. But someone could still do an uncluttered, no-ad or low-ad search engine, aiming to make hard searches easy, and do better than Google. It's not as big a niche as CMGI needed, but it is a niche worth having.
This examples goes from English to German to English to French to English. It was hours of fun to see fortune cookies go from (this is all from the groups.google post):
I had a slightly sanitized version of the code (strict, warn, my variables, etc.) from the one listed in the c.l.p.m newsposting, and I could look for it on my CDs (this is from an ex-employer) if anyone's interested.
Ah, the memories.....
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
This is pretty interesting. The value chain for a search engines looks like so...
Consumer - you, me, the one who lays down their credit card for a product.
->Advertiser - ex. stores.yahoo.com. They produce a product to sell.
-->Affiliate Network - ex. BeFree, CJ, LinkShare. These guys manage the relationship between Advertisers and Publishers.
--->Publisher - These guys find things to sell on stores.yahoo.com and buy eye balls from search engines like overture and google.
---->Search Engine / Ad Network- ex. google.com, overture. These guys sell search placement to Publishers and provide the search engines for those ads.
Before Overture bought Altavista, Overture was just an Ad Network. They took money from Publishers and gave it to search engines like aolsearch, msn, etc. Now that Overture and AV are one company they are their own search engine, just like google is their own search engine and ad network. Anywho, as the money trickles down from the consumer to the search engine, the one who makes out with the lions share is the search engine. It's the only piece of this puzzle that lacks competition. If Overture is able to better compete with google then cost for search placement should decrease and everyone else will benefit.
Overture's search engine has sponsored links and regular links, though they mix them in a bit more than Google does. Link sponsors bid on how much they're willing to pay per click-through, and the sponsored links get sorted by high bid. (And with Overture, the last time I checked, they had a policy that the three highest bidders for a set of keywords get sponsored as advertising on Google searches for the same keywords.) Various people have commmented that this can be used to bash spammers. Go search for bulk email or some similar spammer-advertising phrase, and check out how much they're paying - typically the top couple bidders for that term are in the $2-5 range, though I've occasionally seen it as high as $15 (presumably a badly automated bidding war?), and the next dozen are usually $1 or more. So open a new Mozilla session, open the top few dozen sponsored links in new tabs, reject cookies from the spammers, let it download for a while to be sure they're all there, and then kill off the window. Then go back in to Mozilla and kill off the cookies you've gotten from overture, since they do have various anti-abuse protections to keep people from hacking the searching mechanisms (e.g. to discourage people from using this to bash their customers....) I don't know if they also track IP addresses, but you can be creative. Also check them out using Google.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There have been various attempts by Fundamentally Clueless People to try to get Google regulated by Somebody, Anybody, Especially the Government, preferably by the FTC (because Google is alleged to be essentially a public utility) or at least to get the Ralph Nader folks turned on to Google-Bashing. After all, if Google claims to try to rank the most interesting and relevant topics high in its list, and you're not one of them, that's Just Not Fair! , and at least some arguments from Brandt or people like him want the government to force Google to rank things fairly. Well, duh! The reason everybody uses Google instead of some of its competitors is *precisely* because it usually does a really good job of finding the things everybody is looking for, as opposed to Displaying items 1-10 of the 13122319084324 web pages matching your search in no particularly useful order, and covers a reasonable fraction of the material on the web. The beauty of open technologies like the web is that if you don't like the pagerank, you can go make one of your own; instead of convincing the government Google to change its search order to work the way you want it to, you can just as well run your own search engine or convince your favorite Feds to run their own Politically Correct Search Engine. Meanwhile, if they mess up Google too badly, we'll have to go find something else anyway, and if some liberal-intentioned luser convinces the Feds to mess up all the US search engines, we'll use one from somewhere else, but that's degrading the value of Google for the whole world community, while running your own competitor engine is potentially very valuable to the world (if you're good at it, either as a standalone site or an additional-searches site), or at least neutral.
An entirely different attempt to control Google was the Search King lawsuit. (Slashdot story, LawMeme article.) Unlike Brandt, who's a clueless whiny-liberal type who knows fairness better than you do, Search King was merely greedy, a parasite that tries to sell people a service of improving their Google ranking and then whined because Google downrates sites that try to manipulate their rankings so that their boring pages show up before more genuinely interesting pages. (Of course, Google _will_ be happy to provide you a sponsored-listing ad entry if you pay them, but those are at least visually distinguishable.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why not also make mention of www.DMOZ.org a human created directory based on volunteers indexing a subject. Over 50,000 volunteers so far.