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Overture Buys Fast Search

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the zoom-zoom-zoom dept.

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."

6 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by snack-a-lot · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)

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    E000-VB14-G8RY
  2. More analysis of the purchase... by friedegg · · Score: 4, Informative

    From News.com and The Register, plus a big discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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    Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
  3. Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express by elflet · · Score: 4, Informative
    I vaguely remember a web search engine that allowed the use of regular expressions

    Regular expressions are available in a few kinds of web searching today:

    • Site-level searches (e.g. as provided by Microsoft IIS) often support regular expressions.
    • Search engines may allow filtering of result filenames by regular expressions (e.g. alltheweb.com).

    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.)

  4. Overture vs. Yahoo by JakiChan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  5. Re:Wow! by angle_slam · · Score: 3, Informative
    Obviously, search engine companies don't like this and developed anti-spam techniques to block as much of it as possible. If you are running a serious business and $100/year or so guarantees a decent placement in a major search engine, it's definitely worth it.

    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.

  6. Re:Pigeons away! by d2k297 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Alltheweb.com had a service which searched news sources in near real-time months before google.