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

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?

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.