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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."
The offical press release is here.
my other penis is a vagina
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
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...
So think of a Swiss Army Knife on steroids.
Another nice thing is that the pliers on some models can be 'snapped out' with one hand. Very useful if you're hanging from a lighting rig in a theater with one.
You can read more about them at their website!
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
Altavista started off (kind of like Yahoo, and Google itself in a way) as a happy accident. They wanted a way to showcase Alpha technology, so they created http://altavista.digital.com. They'd spider the web, and since Alphas were the premiere 64 bit chip, they'd show off "hey we have the Internet indexed on a single server with a single system image". But what was essentially advertising, became useful. Just as a lot of things lucked into, they never really guessed that the search engine would become a profit center, and it exploded in popularity. The old owner of the domain altavista.com (forgot what they did) got massive traffic when people would hear "Altavista" and just typed it in to the browser, and Netscape would do the http://www. and the .com bookends. Eventually Digital saw the site as more than just an ad for Alpha chips and made it a product itself, including selling the code for internal indexing and all that. They bought the altavista.com domain for a hefty fee, and now the site is there. I forgot how the whole Compaq purchase fits into the timeline. Eventually Digital/Compaq realized they were horrible at making money from it, and sold it to CMGI, I forgot who has it now. It's been dying a slow death, though babelfish translations are kinda fun.
At one time they were the best search engine, and their boolean searches - though with a clunky interface - gave the best filtering. Now google can claim that, even though they don't have the same degree of control of boolean searches. No one really has had an idea of what altavista should be, from DEC using it as an ad, then trying to "productize and monetize" it (to use buzzwords I hated from my dot.com dayze) to selling it to CMGI and have ad revenue and popups try to prop it up, to "I'm not sure what they're doing now but pretty sure they don't either."
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!
I like the h4x0r version of Google, personally.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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...Seriously, I think the recession is coming to an end...
All in all, it seems the most catastrophic forces have waned...
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?