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."

Comments

Funny

[cyclist1200]

that I was just reading an article about how FAST came up with a lot of the things that geeks idolize Google for.

investors beware

[gaph]

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.

Re:investors beware

[poisoneleven]

I would invest in Overture. As a previous post mentioned, they're making .91 in revenue per share, better than a lot of brick and mortor companies. They've survived the height of the bubble. Up until now, they have been paying Altavista to allow their ads for placement in the search engine, now that money goes in their own pocket. With the purchase of a more sophisticated search engine company, they could really have something going as far as long term money making. Whether it will take a lot of people from Google, probably not, at least in the near future. Even good search engines like Teoma haven't done that, but they had been making money from Altavista, so improving that engine can only help things.

This could actually be a good Tech investment.

Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express

[russx2]

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.

Re:I'm glad there is competition

[Junks Jerzey]

I'm glad there is competition in the search engine marketplace. For too long, google has held an illegal monopoly, forcing geeks with a social conscience like myself to use a second-rate search engine that cannot afford google's patent royalties.

Whenever something good gets popular, there is always a backlash. You probably loved Google when it was beta, and now that it's even better you hate it, simply because everyone else likes it.

To Say there never will be...

[Ghengis]

There never has been a serious challenger to Google and there never will be

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

Actually, you're using Overture...

[Infonaut]

whether you like it or not. Unless you absolutely, positively never use anything but Google, you'll likely bump into Overture.

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.

Potential

[mao che minh]

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.

Re:I'm sticking with google.

[dash2]

Let me be devil's advocate for a moment.

Overture have a particular idea for a search algorithm:
those that pay the most for a search term are most likely to have a useful search result. (The logic becomes clearer if you define "useful" as "something you are willing to pay for").

It's not entirely stupid. And nobody is going to buy the search words for "P=NP", so it'll just use plain old search technology for that.

I still use google though.

Re:With all that $$, why not buy Google?

[poot_rootbeer]

...if you buy all the little companies that are running distant second to Google, and put them together...

Put them together how?

I'd imagine the work required to analyze the millions of lines of code that make up each search engine that Overture now owns, and then integrate all of them into one SOOPER-search engine, is going to end up being more difficult and taking longer than it would to write a fresh search engine from scratch.

My guess is Overture doesn't know what they're doing.