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Overture Buys Fast Search
generic-man writes "Hot off the heels of buying Altavista, Overture today announced it would buy Fast Search. Fast Search, a Norwegian company which manages AllTheWeb.com, will get $70 million in cash with up to $30 million in performance bonuses over the next three years. The deal is expected to close by April."
that I was just reading an article about how FAST came up with a lot of the things that geeks idolize Google for.
Makes you wonder if they are planning to challenge google as the search supreme
if they realize the bubble already burst?
What was that article a few days ago saying that Google is evil because it does all sorts of nefarious things and represents a virtual monopoly in the search engine arena? Not that the arguments held any water, but I'm sure the person who wrote them is rethinking his "monopoly" accusations in light of this.
You mean people use something besides google?
SCO to Hell
I hope they don't ruin it. A combination of Alltheweb.com and Google.com gets me pretty much all the wares I need, but oddly they rarely have the same sites.
(If you constantly get rubbish links while searching for files, try including things like "Index of" in your search along with a likely filename. You tend to get 'raw' file listings.)
E000-VB14-G8RY
Who bought who? I've never heard of any these companies, save Altavista. Wonder where they get the money....
Remember, Amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic
From News.com and The Register, plus a big discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
That's nice of Overture to merge all these search engines into one, so Google only has one company to buy. It just makes it so much easier.
daed si luap
I vaguely remember a web search engine that allowed the use of regular expressions, or maybe its just early alzheimers kicking in.
I am boycotting both Overture and AllTheWeb. Google is much better.
Frankly, I don't think there need to be any other search engines. Google is the only one that matters. Other companies should please move on to other, more pressing, matters.
I think Google is pretty confident in their search technology. I doubt they feel it's necessary to drag themselves down with additional engines.
If by "regular" you mean English, askjeeves was one of the first. I think altavista liscensed their english language web searches.
Quick, somebody start up a web search page. Get bought out for a ton of dough
and retire.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
"For 2003, [Overture] now expects to see revenue of more than $1 billion and earnings per share of 60 cents to 70 cents. Analysts had been expecting the company to report earnings of 91 cents per share on revenue of $1.03 billion."
Wow! Overture has better earnings per share than Microsoft! They've also beaten eBay, which is generally considered one of the most profitable Internet companies. Is pay-for-placement really so valuable that it creates a billion-dollar company? Can someone who understands this business model explain how it's making so much money?
If Overture is truly an Internet-only success story, it bodes well for the rest of us who have jobs that rely on the Internet. More profitable companies mean that the Internet will be taken more seriously and that there will be more Internet jobs, which is always a good thing!
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
i fear the worst for overture, or overlord as would be more fitting, because owning one search engine is difficult enough. it's not as if anyone can effectively compete with google in the first place. but so long as my babble fish doesn't go anywhere, i'll still visit altavista.
Steal my identity- Social Security 444-98-4274
...makes me wodner why the hell I should care.
There never has been a serious challenger to Google and there never will be -- I'm on the East Coast and I can hardly breathe from the vacuum of the hard computer science brain drain...
Does this mean that we're going to see the rise of "Sponsored Listings" in AllTheWeb? Just when i was starting to like their service (when Google didn't give me the answers I want), Overture has to come along and shit it up. I don't mind pay-for-results when thet're clarly indicated a la Google, with a big spanking coloured box around them, but for if I'm going to use AllTheWeb/Overture now, I like it to be clear when I'm participating in their version of 'Payola'...funny thing - when I serach for 'Payola,' the only "Sponsored Listing" is from, of all places, Amazon - the kings of 'Payola.'
Cue The Sun...
From the article, it seems like Overture wants to buy out search engines so that they can sell placement.
Now that we know where their results come from, won't we steer clear?
They could have at least pretended to return relevant results.
I mean, if I want the Ferrari, and I've got the dough, I don't get six or seven Chevys and consider myself the coolest kid on the block.
I just tried a few searches at Overture, and every one stacked what looked like product placements at the top of the responses. And in fact this notice introduced the results pages.
It looks as though they're buying the underperforming search sites for their paid customer lists, which they offer to other search sites that take placement graft.
They're not a search technology company. They're a search-result astroturf company. Their business model is selling ad space camouflaged as content.
The internet is not secure as either a medium or a message.
I think by "regular expressions", he means "regular expressions".
No, that's not what he meant.
I hope you are joking but just in case.
http://sitescooper.org/tao_regexps.html
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I can only hope that overture remedies this situation.
Technically, entering a simple search term in a search engine is a regular expression in itself, albeit a simple one.
Anything more would be pretty taxing on the server (especially with a monster like Google) and would no doubt only be used by very few people (regular expressions aren't exactly your average joe-public's idea of fun).
Would be interesting to see this implemented, though.
Regular expressions are available in a few kinds of web searching today:
It's unlikely you'd find regular expressions for searching content in search engines due to the way they build their indexes. (Here's an overly simplistic example, but it gets the idea across: a simple engine might split a page into words then maintain a list of all pages that contain that word. Using hashing, it's fast to look up a particular word in the table, but to search for "w\w+d" {all words beginning with w and ending with d} could take so much longer as to be impractical; it might even be impossible depending on how they've built their lookup tables.)
This is short-sited. Given the number of times people in the computer industry have lived to regret such wide-sweeping, bold comments, yours may be considered a rather ignorant thing to say.
-1 Flamebait
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
The trick is to remember that search engines for some time now have been intertwined in a bizarre series of relationships that mostly go on behind the scenes.
For example, Overture is utilized by Excite, Go, InfoSpace, Yahoo, Netscape, MSN, NBCi, and Ask Jeeves. AllTheWeb is utilized by Excite and Lycos.
Some search engines incorporate results from three or more other engines, and synthesize the results before spitting them out to the end user. Excite, for example, uses data from FindWhat, LookSmart, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, and Overture.
The above relationships are based on a six-month old chart I made to help myself keep the search engine world straight in my own head. Things change quickly, as we've seen of late, in the search engine world. But even though there is consolidation in the market, there are a few niche players that could continue to stay viable.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
In Google every ad is obviously an ad, and there are only a few per page. In Overture my search returned 20 ads that look like results (though a side note hinted otherwise) before it shows actual results. Search for "Flash MX" - result number 21 is Macromedia.com - everything before that is an ad. I don't care how good their search is, with the results formatted like this it seems like they return very low-relevancy links.
They don't have one on search, as there are numerous search engines. It's not their fault their competition sucks.
Earnings per share alone does not mean anything.
I wholly own my company so it only has one share, and we're succesful so our EPS is several thousand times that of Microsoft. Does contain any information about our market cap? Nope.
In related news, Overture is at their 52-week low today, directly as a result of their shopping spree.
Investors feel that while buying one search engine might have made sense (Overture actually lost out on a number of large deals last year because they weren't able to provide algorithmic searches) but buying two is overkill. It does not serve the purpose of the first acquisition - namely to complete their product palette.
... [damn short subjects]... to search than web content.
FAST has a stronger business in search solutions, not a web search engine. All the web, one of FAST's newer products is hopping to change that and it seems that this is what Overture is hoping to capitalize on. Most of FAST's current business comes from outsourcing search and indexing technology/support to other companies such as Lycos and various article and abstract databases. http://www.fastsearch.com/partners/ has a list of some of their bigger customers. Google still doesn't have quite the same penetration that FAST has in the corporate intranet and 'other than html' search areas. Personally I think this is due to the nature of Google's hit relevancy algorithms... very good for heavily cross referenced/linked data sets... not as good at pure keyword type searches and very limited support of advanced linguistic features.
Have you thought for yourself today?
One interesting thing to note: Overture was one of the big customers of Inktomi search. Inktomi was making a lot of money from Overture's business. Plenty of folks thought that they would probably buy Inktomi since Inktomi was dying.
However, Yahoo ended up with Inktomi. So clearly Overture, a company who made money mainly because they didn't own much hardware - they were marketing and sales - now found their search engine owned by another company. Overture may be buying up search engines to avoid the fact that Yahoo doesn't need to let them do business with the organization formerly known as Inktomi, especially since Yahoo is an Overture customer.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
The underlying importance of these recent moves is that a major financial holder who possess a cunning internet prescence is buying up search engines. Google rules now, but if Yahoo or Overture throws enough money at something else, then "it" just might become a contender in the coming months. 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.
007-373-5963 - That's the code to fight Mike Tyson. Eat it.
Overture is and always has been a pay per click search engine. The higher you bid per click the higher your results in the search engine, nothing to do with relevancy of the search item till your finished with the bidded results. Alta Vista will be used for more ppc and for it's existing customer base.
Overture is not a money loser and it has been making plenty of money. It has had 200 million in revenue last quarter and actually posted a profit.
Hmmm... Pie...
Let's ignore, for the moment, the quality of any of the search engines. When I awkgle through the web logs at my company, more than 99% of all the hits from a search engine come from google. There's no evident second place finisher in this race -- There's Google at number one, and then a whole bunch of noise. Now, we don't advertise on Overture (or google, either). What do others see?
One company that I've never heard of bought another company that I've never heard. Wahoo!
Now for the fun part. Every time you click an Overture result, you cause the advertiser to pay Overture. As mentioned at SpamBattle, this is a great way to screw companies that sell spam software or services:
Use the /. effect to bankrupt spammers!
But do they have the advanced pigeon technology of Google yet?
I think not.
Remember, one does an IPO because one needs money to expand.
Google is profitable, and doesn't really need tons of money to do anything at the moment. They also have an excellent future. I don't see them getting less important at all. If I were one of the Google owners, I don't think I *would* do an IPO. I'd hang onto my ownership of the company.
May we never see th
Overture buying altavista too
Only take advice from somebody who is where you want to be.
The one thing you'd want to do is disallow wildcards at the beginning of a word. That would require going through *all* words in your index. But so long as you have the wildcards in the middle or end there really isn't that much of a problem. For effeciency I could see requiring at least 2-3 letters at the beginning of the word prior to allowing wildcards. But that's about it.
The problem with most searching is that 90% of people using them just want simple queries. Yet those who want more accurate searching will do more advanced searching (i.e. wildcards, proximity, and so forth) Yet those are admittedly more expensive and more complex. But I personally think tha the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for the power user. I truly wish that Google, for instance, had more advanced query technology.
In the longer term the trend will be that as well as having to sort through the normal dross thrown up by search engines, you will also have to swim through a pages stagnated by dodgy companies paying for the privilege to force their unwanted products onto your screen?
HTF did this get modded as a troll?
Before anyone is allowed to moderate, they should have to provide proof that they can demonstrate, at least, a basic understanding of irony and/or sarcasm.
Just wondering, but what happened with that whole GoTo.com and that traffic-light-logo-fight they had with disney and Go.com? I think it's funny how it's completely irrelevant now since they've changed their name.. and go.com isn't a big portal anymore.
My log files are getting SPAMMED more than my email accounts these days.
Fake-up referrer fields set from www.########.com/FREE_WEB_MONITORING_SERVICE
User agent fields flogging domain name registration services to webmasters.
Pain in the arse for a small site just trying to look at stats for its visitors.
You are comparing quarterly EPS for Ebay ($0.21) and Microsoft ($0.47) to the full year forecast for Overture. Not exactly apples-to-apples.
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
Seriously, is this a joke? Was this sarcasm? There are so many flaming idiots on the web I can't tell who is being sarcastic and who just has their head so far up thier own ass they could eat their own stomach. Well in any case, it was good for a nervous sort of chuckle, and a ponderous sort of "What the fuck?..."
Now these fools will wreck the search engine, it always happens when you aquire, rather than build a thing. Say goodbye to Alltheweb.com and say hello to broken stuff.
I can assure you that the FAST FTP Search implements full regular expression support.
are belong to us????
I've been thinking about this for a while. They do checking so that you can't just keep clicking the link and costing the company more money.
While the slashdot effect would be good for a few URL's, it wouldn't be pervasive enough. It sounds to me like the perfect opportunity for a distributed client. Maybe something like SETI@Home that would trawl through results for undesirables and "click-through".
Actually, I'm hoping this gets modded up and some script kiddie puts it in the next version of Nimda/CodeRed/Slammer/Whatever.
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
Wonder if Overture needs the cookie for this to actually have effect. I don't wanna risk it.
This (brief) code is hereby released, without copyright, under the GNU General Public License version 2.
This topic hasn't generated many comments.
One might think it was less interesting than others. That would be a mistake.
Few comments may indicate that an important topic is already summed up in the first paragraph (as in this case). It is no less important because there isn't much to add to it.
I really appreciate the news this topic presents. In this environment and in view of recent comments about Google, there are obvious and ominous possibilities to consider.
My concern is that such topics might be skipped over in the future because they didn't generate a lot of noise from the peanut gallery. So, the bottom line is don't post these things in hopes of getting lots of comments, but rather post what you think is important. Thanks timothy and generic-man.
...omphaloskepsis often...
And once Overture has bought up all search engines that matter, they'll transform them into giant advertising portals...
Because unlike the bubble companies they understood the web is all about finding information - not "content" or entertainment.
Hence banner advertising is a no-starter, because users are looking for information, and an irrelevant banner provides no extra information.
But a relevant text advert which matches what someone is looking for has a good chance of being clicked on and creating business.
In theory Overtures business model is actually better than Google's because it does not rely on technical advantage, but is based around auctioning adverts to the highest bidder + network effect: by offering more money to search portals from clicks than they would earn if the search portal set up their own pay-per-click.
Overture would have dominated the industry very nicely if it had remained a level playing field, but Google came along and improved its search technology by an order of magnitude over the others.
Now, Overtures business model is threatened by Google winning such a big percentage of the search market that its own portal customers combined cannot compete with Google. In this case no-one is prepared to pay high pay-per-clicks to Overture, and its competitive advantage from network effect starts to collapse.
So Overture is unlikely to use FAST or Alta-Vista as part of its own pay-per-click engine, and is much more likely to try to improve the genuine search results of its portal customers by offering them FAST/AV (quite possibly for free).
If users at for example MSN, instead of going over to Google to get good search results discover that the MSN search is good-enough (because its by FAST), then Overture will stem the threat and earn money from its pay-per-clicks at MSN.
They're up against it though, because Google have such a good brand now, and even if FAST were to have some arguable technical advantage over Google , unless its an order of magnitude advantage, Google's brand will remain number one and take a lions share of the whole market indefinitely.
Overture has abuse detectors on this to prevent robots from slamming their advertisers
- you can hit them all once, but they do give you cookies, and I think they look at REFERER, so you want to enter those addresses in your browser yourself instead of clicking the link. If you want to hit them a few times, accept the cookies and clear them out in between.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be
gone in two years. He was half right.
-- Dennis Ritchie
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