Slashdot Mirror
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 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 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.