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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.
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.
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"
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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
"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!
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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
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".
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.
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.
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.)
Sounds more like they're trying to bring Altavista back up to a usable level.
It currently takes AV upwards of 6+ months to update indexed pages. They also don't do anything with newly found sites or disappearing sites that that aren't explicitly (re)submitted.
What's the use in that? Google, for one, goes over their entire index for updated/new/missing pages once a month.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
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.
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"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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Not all businesspeople think like that. Erm, maybe no businessperson thinks like that.
What you say might have been true. Traditionally.
Google might be profitable, and an owner could rake in, say, $1m per year - but that's not going to get him a 200-foot yacht.
If you take the company public, you can easily and instantly sell some or all of your shares on the market, then retire early with hundreds of millions in the bank.
That's the #1 reason people do IPOs, and that's the reason Google will go public once the US economy is in better shape.