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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."
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
Makes you wonder if they are planning to challenge google as the search supreme
'The acquisition, combined with the recent purchase of search engine AltaVista, is designed to help Overture "create the most powerful and comprehensive search capability on the Internet," the company said in a release.'
I would wager that's the plan.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
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.
but so long as my babble fish doesn't go anywhere, i'll still visit altavista
google has the same thing, except ad-free:
Google Language tools
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.)
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."
Though it may be less than useful to the general public, Google does not have an FTP search engine. The company just purchased does. I can see *some* value there.
May we never see th
It's a lot more than $100/year at Overture. I know someone who runs a web based business, and they spend $400 per DAY for good search engine placement with Google and Overture.
They're not quite that evil. Their model is really just selling advertising through affiliate sites, a bit like Doubleclick. The difference is that Overture's ads are indexed to specific terms, exactly like Google's text-ads. Honest sites will clearly mark the ads from Overture as advertisements (again, like Google does with text ads), just as they won't try to pretend that a banner from Doubleclick is actually some kind of editorial content.
Now, Overture is still bad. (So is Doubleclick!) I think it can legitimately be criticized for abusing the patent system in its suit against Google.
Alltheweb.com had a service which searched news sources in near real-time months before google.