Slashdot Mirror
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
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 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".
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.)
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
Before Google was started it was assumed that internet search was either "a solved problem or not very interesting". Google proved them wrong; why is it inconceivable that another company could beat out Google now?
.com bubble has burst doesn't mean that everyone should stop exploring viable online business opportunities.
You don't need a bubble to keep you afloat if you've got a useful product and a good business plan. The fact that the
-j
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."
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.
I used to work for a search engine company that was acquired by Yahoo and now I work for another one. Here's the deal:
Most businesses need leads from the yellow pages and other standard means of advertising. The amount of business that they get from leads coming from search engines has been increasing steadily over the years. The problem is that nobody will find you in a search if your site has not been crawled, or if it appears beyond the third or fourth page in the results. There are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies that "optimize" your site for a fee so that it appears more relevant to search engines.
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. For bigger markets (porn, for example), businesses are willing to pay more to get an edge over their competitors. Look at the Yellow Pages (an extremely profitable business) for an older example of this model in action.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic