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."
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
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
An unprofitable Internet company buys another unprofitable business company! Who says the Internet boom was over?
... 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.
and to think many moons ago in 1998 the domain name alone sold for 3.3mil.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
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...
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?
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 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
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.
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.
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"
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."
Oh yeah, and AltaVista has Babblefish, that's cool too.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
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...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.
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.
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?
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.
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.