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."

Comments

I don't know much about Overture...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Financial muscle ?

[IanBevan]

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.

Who Cares if Google maintains their lead?

[mr.crutch]

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.

Re:Who Cares if Google maintains their lead?

[Nessak]

Well, I care.

Google has by in large done good thing for searching and the internet in general. They showed that you don't need $100 million ad budgets and hundreds of images. They provide a very good service to users (Search, Groups, etc) and they make a good profit at it. Their interface is very clean and neat, fast loading, and works with allmost everything. No only is their advertising not annoying like most sites, it is sometimes very helpfull. I click on google "placement" ads and never click on banner ads. They provide good searches for things like linux and most major universities. They are a "good" company, as far as companies go.

The effects of google on the internet can been seen. I have seen many sites trying to get away from the thousands of banners in favor of clean neat data in the google manner.

If this new company does all of this and provide better searches, then I will use them. But if they place ads in searches without making it very clear they are ads (unlike google) and use some ad-ridden interface and still "lead" then this won't be good for internet in general.

I like the google school of thaught when it comes to a internet company. Even if google fails, I would like to see this concept continue to do so well in the marketplace and with technical users.

But they're labeled

[axlrosen]

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?

Re:But they're labeled

[Scrameustache]

So why is one "pay-for-placement" and the other isn't?

Because I had been using Google for years before I ever read the results in the "sponsored links" section, whereas the whore-for-placement systems adds just one more tiny frustration in my day, having to make a slight mental effort to ignore the first results and go down to get to what I really want.

I sometimes go for the sponsored links, when I'm looking for something commercial (once every other blue moon), but for my everyday geek searches for futurama quotes and python lyrics, I don't want to be forced to read that commercial site X has great prices on python DVDs, I just want What I Was Looking For.

Re:Incredible news!

[po_boy]

Overture will pay AltaVista in common stock currently valued at $80 million, plus $60 million in cash; and it will assume certain of AltaVista's liabilities.

I don't understand why you people don't read the articles. I can't stress this enough, people: read the articles. They contain, useful, topical information.

Why should Google be special?

[targo]

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.

Brand loyalty

[Forgotten]

I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead

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.

Re:Brand loyalty

[interiot]

Google proved it could really mop up by focusing on a high quality search engine rather than focusing on ramming as many big obnoxious ads as possible down your users throats, and they also did it without comprimising on their ethics. Without google around, everyone assumes that the only way to make more money is to abuse and exploit your users more, but with Google around, the execs start listen to the more rational members of their corporations more.

No google isn't sacred, and I'm sure their search tech will be trumped at some point, but it's not likely that company will have as much integrity unless google manages to stick around enough to permanently alter the whole sector or more.

Re:The day a seach engine uses "pay for placement"

[rawshark]

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.

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"

Why?

[Daetrin]

Why do you hope that Google can maintain their lead? I would think competition would be good, and last i checked, AltaVista had a feature i really like that Google doesn't. If you give AltaVista a term in quotes, it will search for _exactly_ that string. Google on the other hand will often decide that punctuation is extraneous, and i'll frequently find myself wading through ten times as many pages as i need because Google decided to drop the "'" or "," or whatever.

Oh yeah, and AltaVista has Babblefish, that's cool too.

Re:Are people that fickle?

[Frizzle Fry]

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

Switching search engines requires much less time and effort than switching operating systems (or environments, or whatever OS/2 was).

What about BABELFISH?

[NigelJohnstone]

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.