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Yahoo Buys Overture for $1.63 Billion
securitas writes "Today Yahoo announced it plans to buy search technology company Overture for $1.63 Billion. The move is seen as a way to compete with rivals like Google and MSN, especally in the paid search and advertising category. This takeover occurs following this article about Google and Overture's race to secure partners for its paid search advertising. Other reoprts at CNN Money, ZDNet/CNet, AP via the Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones via Yahoo. Press release at Overture and Yahoo."
Where the heck did Yahoo get 1.63 Billion
If there is nothing left worth living, what are you willing to die for?
I've never heard of Overture and I'm sure a lot of other people haven't either. Do they actually make any search technology worth mentioning?
What does overture have that is worth $1.63 billion to Yahoo? Yahoo's already still pretty good. What are they hoping to get out of Overture?
Is it too late, has google established such a name for itself that people won't try anything else?
Altavist was popular but full of ads so it was easy to switch because google was ad-free.
What is the point of trying to improve the service? Just stick a few more things on the main page and release a few more of those lovely "Do you Yahoo?" commercials.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Is this the kind of monopolistic world we want?
Yahoo! Buys! Overture! for! $1.63! Billion!!
.now it's fine.:-)
There..
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Did anyone notice how popular search engines have names that don't make any sense? What the hell is "Google" or "Yahoo!" (Yes I know google means something but it sounds like it fell out of a gooses ass.) on the other hand check out www.yahooters.com
My Signature
Everyone used to use Yahoo. It was a verb, like many people use Google. "Do you Yahoo?" everyone said.
But now the big mama has had her throne taken by another, and is hotly pursuing the rival. Yahoo just recently bought up Inktomi (which will be very interesting to see what happens if they dump Google's web search and integrate Inktomi... which is probably bound to happen soon).. and now they just ate up Overture for PPC.
Yep. She's mad. But can she take back her place in the kingdom? I doubt it.
MSN I can see competiting with, but Google? The best part about Google is the complete lack of picture ads. A much better use of all that money would be to get rid of advertising, which is all over Yahoo.
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
Overture press release and the Yahoo Media Relations press release center.
Anyways I remember with Yahoo was "partnered" with altavista and it became big enough to be it's own search, hell I remember there being a "search more..." that would link to hotbot and other search engines of the day. Then there was the "partnership" with google, who became big and started to innovate after yahoo promoted them.
I think Yahoo needs to decide if it wants to be a portal or a search engine, because it's trying to be a one-stop-shop. You got games, music, movies, stock, travel, auctions, email, directions, and the kitchen sink. Is ad revenue really that big for these companies?
I stopped using yahoo when I realized that google found what I needed quicker with more precise search words. In essence I switched from yahoo to google because google was better.
Innovate don't just buy out the small fish, that practice is really old and sort of annoying.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Yahoo should have saved its pennies. Sure, buying Overture improves its position in the paid placement portion of the search market, but what Yahoo really needs is a search function that is on par with Google. People have been defecting from using Yahoo as their primary search engine for years, and they're not about to come back unless Yahoo can offer search results that are comparable to Google.
This acquisition isn't likely to help Yahoo do what it needs most: better searching. Until they achieve better search results, people are going to continue to defect to Google and its brethren.
I don't really use Google because it returns better results. I mean, it returns pretty good results. I manage to find what I need. But I really use Google because, while they do have advertising, their advertising is not obnoxious. It doesn't pop-up, blink, animate, or pretend to be legitimate search results or articles. It *does* occasionally actually pertain to what I'm looking for, as opposed to Yahoo's continued insistance that I need to lose weight and find a man... using, of course, the insanely-expensive Ediets and Yahoo! Personals.
So, in the end, Google would win even if it took me a few minutes longer to find what I wanted, because I can *bear* spending a few minutes on Google. Ten seconds on Yahoo, and my eyes are bleeding.
According to this morning's Wall Street Journal, what we are seeing right now with the NASDAQ is consistent with previous boom and bust investment cycles. It seems that there is a big runup, a big fall, and about 2.5 to 3 years later, a revisiting of the now-despised investments. Eventually, that residual boom dies off too. The expert they cited in the story figures the NASDAQ will peak at around 2400, well above its current 1750-ish level.
Before this is modded offtopic, what this means is that Yahoo!, which has enjoyed a tremendous runup in this recent boom now has some cash to invest. Looks like they are trying to do some expansion like back in the good ol' days when we had AOL buying Time Warner. Look for some other mergers and acquistions unless or until this boomlet ends.
In principio erat Verbum.
This is the latest in a series of buyout announcements that have come along in the last few weeks. It looks like the business community is preparing for economic recovery and these deals are meant to position themselves all the better for it. Most significantly, these deals are coming from several different industries:
Peoplesoft & JD Edwards (software)
Oracle & Peoplesoft (software)
Lehman Brothers & Neuberger Berman (finance)
Yellow Freight & Roadway (trucking)
Boise Cascade & Office Max (office products)
Let's see what the next few months bring, but the mood is definitely shifting.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Ah, but then they wouldn't make more money by spending that money, which is their intent.
Sure they can.
1. Less ads
2. ?????
3. Profit!!
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
Yahoo seems to have lost the search war. And that doesn't seem to be a problem. Their search engine is their least compelling feature right now (well, second least compelling, right after the shopping section).
:P
Yahoo!Mail has, at least from what I can see, displaced Hotmail as the General Free E-Mail Provider Of Choice. (It absolutely amazes me Microsoft.) Now, i'm not a marketing research agency-- ll i have to work with is single data points, but I never hear anyone say "check my Hotmail" anymore. I hear "Check my Yahoo!Mail" a lot. And it seems to me that all 5,634 of my 11-year-old sister's friends use Yahoo Mail. They seem to act as some kind of borg-like unified swarm. And Yahoo!IM seems set to lose that war in the long run, but they aren't doing bad, for now. Certainly doing better than MSN messenger. And their news service is passable.
And all I know is, as long as Yahoo.com provides me a place where I can play scrabble on the internet, I'll keep coming back
Basically, they seem to be turning into the first non-shit instance of this mythical "portal" thingy everyone kept talking about during the dot-com bubble. For that, they need A search functionality, but they don't necessarily need perfect search.
(P.S. i don't know about you but i never heard ANYONE use 'yahoo' as a verb except in Yahoo.com advertising)
Can they beat Google? Hell no, never. Can they beat MSN? I'd bet money that they will.
How come the search engine on overture.com says,"Powered by Inktomi" which is a Yahoo! company ?
Altavista, as Altavista was owned by Overture.
http://www.altavista.com/about
It really shouldn't come as any surprise, but it looks like the search companies are just trying to push for more visitors, rather than focusing on a better product. It's this very same concept that made Yahoo become what is, in my opinon, it's biggest problem: bloatware. Let's face it, Google is the closest we have to a website that's really focused on being a search engine anymore. Hopefully this won't change anytime soon.
http://mediagoblin.org/
So, it's all about search engines, now, is it?
Ok, but I'm still waiting on push technology, portals and b2whatever to revolutionize my web 'experience'(*).
I will admit that I don't have any idea whether this makes good business sense, but my gut reaction is that Yahoo! is overpaying. In fact, I expect that this will throw them in the same leaky washbasin with AOL Time Warner, not Google.
(*) Face it -- NONE of this is going to get any better until we stop using words like 'experience' and 'product' to describe this stuff. Marketing is the real evil!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Have a look at the article on El Reg
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
They have a huge number of advertisers and in Q1 2002, they delivered 150 million paid search listings a month.
Overture used to be paid search portal GoTo.com which recently bought AltaVista for $140 million and then bought Fast Search / Alltheweb.com for $100 million. It was one of the IdeaLab properties. Interesting AP article about Overture's history and challenges over the last six years mirrored here.
...google gives better results. If now yahoo gives better results i'll switch. The internet is my tool to help me find what i need to know, i'll use the best search engine who ever it is. As for advertising, yes it is nice to see so litle at google but i have learned to ignore all advertising now anyway. A page has them imbedded and I barely notice it.
Who still uses the "lesser search engine players", like AllTheWeb, HotBot, FAST, etc., anyway? Everyone I know uses Google, maybe Yahoo, or just the MSN homepage search.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I should check facts before hitting submit. The fee got a link on the right -- the Sponsored Links section. They did not get a better ranking for a fee.
--
mainly because they have the usenet archives. There's just so much information there, that you can't get anywhere else.
Also, it really helps that they don't have irritating ads, and that it renders great in lynx.
How on earth is Yahoo!'s gonna compete with that? Seriously, I'd like to know. By using a state-of-the-art search engine? That's not going to cut it, not by a long shot.
Having used Overture, I can safely say that Google will remain the leader in search engine technology.
Here's an example. Search for "linux" using Overture. The results are all paid results, worthless sludge like "training classes" and "hosting providers."
Now search for "linux" using Google. You get relevant, useful results with all sponsored links clearly separated from the good stuff. Of course, most people aren't as smart as me, so they might click the sponsored links. I remain convinced that Google is the best search engine ever.
Thank you.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Can't really say anything intelligent about this buyout except that I got spooked out by that slow zoom the woman with the vacant stare with with those ominous dark clouds in the background? I think this merger is doomed.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
It's not too late at all. First, consider how the different search engines changed in popularity over the years. Lycos was big for a while, Alta Vista...no need to list them. I remember getting an email from a friend..."Google has over a million pages indexed!". That was the big news, then I started using it. As have many others. Times can change. And they will. Just because Google is number one now doesn't mean they'll stay entrenched in that spot. It's not like buying software for your computer and then not wanting to switch because you'll have to buy new stuff. Plus, you can always TRY another search engine, and if it's better, then you switch and tell your friends.
This is also interesting because of how all the different engines depend on each other in one way or another for their rankings.
Think about how many web developers, designers, consultants, etc are all bragging about their search engine placement capabilities. Obviously it's the next thing to make money on. The big boys want to make sure they're in there as more and more people are relying on search engines for business.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
of a 'better product' unless there's more people using it? They're giving it away for free in hopes that people will view ads, so *of course* they want more visitors. If google had a $10/year version with no ads, I bet they'd make a load of money off that, AND save bandwidth and processing power (or fit more *real* results in the same bandwidth). Sadly, I suspect that anyone that did this would price it higher than most could afford. $9.95/year *feels* like a good price point to probably a majority of consumers, but I think it'd be priced at $24.95 or $39.95/year or $14.95/month or something insanely greedy. :)
Probably what'll happen is google (or maybe teoma or someone smaller) will try 'ad-free' pages purchased in bulk - like $5 gets you 1000 ad-free results pages or something like that, so I can use them when I want, not on a timed basis (doesn't slashdot have this in place now?)
creation science book
Ah, so Overture are the completely unethical weasels who mix paid search results in with the actual search results you're looking for, with no clear delineation between the two.
Well, Google's place at the top is safe then.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I see people ranting about Yahoo's "bad search results" and how google is "better". It's relative. For searching through information that has been specifically published to a web page, google is better. But they're not resting there, and Yahoo has a couple legs up on google that they're not playing yet.
Yahoo has loads more information about many users than google does, via the Yahoo personals, my yahoo, and other personalized services. If they can integrate some of that information into the search process, they'll be the new search king.
Google recognizes this already, with the purchase of the blogger stuff they're going to go after that market, but it's still aggregating info from people who already consider themselves publishers of some sort (at least for now).
Google has groups.google.com, but Yahoo has groups.yahoo.com, yet seems to treat it as a separate property. If someone is a recognized authority on a topic, and has a yahoo personalized page, they need to come up as a resource when I search for something before/above 'web pages' which probably have less relevance.
creation science book
Yahoo opens software center in India - causing further damage to the US economy.
I currently use overture to advertise one of my online products. The fact is it would take so long to get my page up on the search rankings that I would miss loads potential revenue for people doing a search for my product. Using overture it costs me $.10 - 1.50 per click depending on the search but the coverage is really good. I pop up on sites I didnt even know existed and I get more downloads then I expected. It is a sad fact but this is the direction the web is going to go. You will have to pay to be seen on the internet or hope that you get the 20,000+ hits to your website to even start to rank in the search list.
I mean geeze it's insane that a college project would even have the ability to pop 1.83 billion at another company.
Yahoo! is traded on the international stock market now, and has been since 1996. Have you been following the news lately?
"1.6 Billion dollars, and they need the ad revenue from putting ads at the bottom of my yahoo e-mail account?"
Yahoo gives you an email account for free, in exchange for showing you ads while you view mail and putting a two-line advertisement at the bottom of each email you send ("Do you Yahoo?!" and then one line advertising a particular service.)
They also give you an option (priced at $19.95/year) that allows you to check your Yahoo email using POP3 and send your Yahoo email using SMTP, thus circumventing all of the ads mentioned above.
Honestly, this seems really fair to me... either put up with the ads or pay $1.66 a month to get rid of them. Of course, it shows you how little ad revenue Yahoo really has, since at $1.66/month/user they allow you to get rid of all of them while checking or sending email...
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Yahoo is buying Overture to start sandbagging for the oncoming search engine wars. The browser war may have been lost years ago, but the search engine war is just heating up. The camps are aligning... Who are you going to side with?
As with most everyone else here, Google is my web- searcher of choice. Years ago it was Yahoo, but that is no more.
However, Yahoo is probably the site I use the most. They have tons of other features (news, games, (fantasy) sports, mail, address books, etc etc...), and most of them are free. I haven't found another site on the web that has anywhere near as many comprehensive and well-designed features as Yahoo. So, in the end, I couldn't care less about Yahoo's searching ability, because I don't think of Yahoo as a search engine any more. They're something different. And perhaps it is time for Yahoo to realize that also, and not spend billions of dollars improving the aspects of their site that no one needs anymore.
According to this, Overture currently provides the related links on MSN. So instead of fostering competition with MSN, this deal means that MSN and Yahoo are business partners.
Yahoo! did not buy a "search engine" they purchased a company that provides a Pay Per Click advertising mechanism that is most likely very profitable. I can say that they they get a pretty good chunk of my advertising budget every month.
These are examples from my business. Using the same basic keywords.
google: $2.85 average cost per click
overture: $.95 average cost per click
Which one of those makes more sense to you from a business perspective?
Answer: It depends on who you're talking about. Overture is a wonderful thing to hand to a PHB to make him feel good. It has everything that PHBs love. Gambling, bluffing, seemingly high stakes, and best of all, it counts as "work". I'll never forget the look on my boss' face when I was leaving the company and told him that he would have to (read: get to) control the Overture listings. At that time, Overture had recently gone to a flexible pricing structure, meaning that if you bid $1.00 for a keyword, and your nearest competitor bid 75 cents, and the next bid 50 cents, you would pay 76 cents (1 penny more than the next highest bid), your competitor would pay 51 cents, et al. I was able to devise (at least, that's what I told him I did, after vast amounts of "research"; in reality, I think most dummies could figure this out) a plan. Storm into keywords with bids of upwards of $1.50, where the next highest bid would be in the 20 cent range. The companies bidding 20 cents aren't going to jump you up to $1.51, and you end up only actually paying 21 cents, while scaring off any serious bids to overtake you. Then, and here's where the gamesmanship and paying attention come in, if someone pulls the same thing on you, you bid $1.49 to their $1.50. Now every click costs your competitor $1.50, and only costs you 21 cents, even though you're in second. Bleed them dry. But watch out that they don't drop to $1.48 and turn the tables. My PHB loved this crap. He would sit and click refresh on the bid page just to make sure that Hated Company X wasn't pulling a fast one. Kept him off my back the last week I was there, and I'm sure he's still at it.
All that said, I found Overture to be a gigantic money suck, apparently a good enough one that Yahoo! would like it for themselves. Any industry with decent penetration has enough competition that bidding will get ridiculously out of hand. And I had a pretty good idea that our paid-for-listings on the likes of Yahoo were just cannibalizing the clicks from our actual search listing on Yahoo, and costing us 50 cents a click. Overture may be pretty much idiot-proof, but there are any number of free and relatively easy ways to increase traffic, if you've just got a little time and energy to put into it. So, if Overture changes, or dies, or melds into Yahoo, the PHBs (and those who deal with them) may be disappointed, but those with the ability to do a little actual work shouldn't actually care.
I know you just didn't admit to getting pop-ups on Slashot. POP-UPS?? What browser are you running?? ;)
If you admit to using IE, at least use some kind of pop-up blocker.
I would imagine surfing the web would be crazy without Mozilla. Thank God I'm sheltered now.
was that if they can fork out 1.6 BILLION dollars for Overture, that probably represents 20 years of ad revenue on Yahoo mail.. so why not skip the ads and keep the billion bucks?
I didn't know the William Tell Overture (MIDI) was worth that much. Maybe the Yahoo! theme just sucked that bad?
Am I stupid? Hell I'm posting AC! I'm not willing to take that kind of a hit on my karma. But you know who I am
-uso.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Why use a search engine that is known to closely mix $-manipulated results with "real" results?
I used Yahoo! long after it became popular to Google. I plead complacency. Can you guess what finally drove me to overcome my inertia? Those f*cking pop ups/pop unders. I left for greener pastures over at Google. Sorry, Yahoo.
Of course now, I have my Firebird/Phoenix block ALL popups.
Yahoo is the name of some tribe / country / race in Jonathan Swift's novel "Gulliver's travels".
You have to love it when you can spend over a billion dollars on a company because of your company's worth on paper. Yahoo seems to be turning the corner on their new business model but spending this type of money on a non-must have company seems to be a throw back to the dot com's who wiped their asses with venture capitalist money back in the glory days.
Yahoo better hope that they can get a couple more Yahoo personals sign ups to help foot the bill on this one:D
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
$1.63 billion? that's nothing. the exposure on slashdot as a result of the deal is worth at least that!
Well, actually, I hope to spin another layer of recursion to this.
I placed small text and some screenshots of this occurences on my web page.
shrinking.
Yahoo now owns : Altavista, Overture, alltheweb (FAST), Inktomi
Google owns: google
MS owns: MSN
so at the moment, the entire crawler based SE market is owned entirely by Google and Yahoo - no, teoma doesn't count. MSN is in the process of developing their own crawler based engine, but I don't expect anything stellar.. they'll eventually just buy someone elses.. mabye at that point teoma will count (it would if it had any traffic, which is all msn can provide)
Yahoo forks out $1.6 Billion in funny money for a worthless dot-bomb.
Someone should tell Yahoo that it's not 1999 anymore. How long before we see Yahoo on the front page of F***edCompany?
Yahoo's search results are (currently) provided by Google, and have been since 2000.
They've been outsourcing and not using their own technology since at least 1996.
More info can be found here
"The move is seen as a way to compete with rivals like Google..."
When was the last time YOU searched using Yahoo?? Yahoo uses Google... every search you do from Yahoo says "Search Technology provided by Google" at the bottom.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Then there was the "partnership" with google, who became big and started to innovate after yahoo promoted them.
Dude, google was around and great already before yahoo starting using them.
simon
home page
Are there any non-commercial projects afoot to build a distributed web search engine? I found Grub , a SETI@home-like web crawler, but it seems to me that any commercial venture under sufficient financial pressure will eventually resort to paid listings.
...what YFI means
now i am no longer sad...
It will be interesting to see what happens to Overture's distribution channels. Overture currently distributes paid results to yahoo, excite, hotbot, go.com, altavista, msn, and lycos. Will Overture limit its distribution partners to just Yahoo? If so then that means more business for google because companies like hotbot are going to want paid results. If not then yahoo is entering new territory by competing with google paid results on portals other than Yahoo.
This aquisition is interesting because Yahoo is now one monster of a company that has a very wide range of services. They offer paid results (overture), organic results (fast), Y!Stores, Y!News, Y!Personals, Y!Real Estate, Y!Travel, Y!Auctions, Geocities, Y!Mail and on and on. Google gets kudos for being a leader in search marketing but they are now where close to offering a similar range of services as Yahoo. Yahoo will have plenty to fall back on if they lose the search war to Google.
Did no one learn anything from the AOL-time warner Merger? I question weather it is value for the invesors of yahoo throw this much money around. As a programmer I did a project to copy the impementation of Google and we used a SQL database to do it. We where not trying to duplicate performace but duplicate complexity and examine the dificulties. After examining the problem I don't understand why it would not be a hell of a lot cheaper to come up with a new implementation of a crawler. The supply of out of work programmers is at an all time high. People such as me coming out of Universlu of Alberta who have taken algorithms courses would find the problem a challeng but doable. I would like to know if in fact they have concidered coming up with thier own solution before going ahead with the merger. They should offer accountability to investors showing they did concider it. Did they?
Yahoo has a near-monopoly on mailing lists, thanks to its purchases of bankrupt listservs. These usually have a higher S:N ration than Usenet, though many are "members-only": you have to join the list to see its archives.
The Web-based interface is horrible (full-screen ad pages before every other message), but it's still possible to susbcribe and post to its lists without ever visiting the site.
I was merely clarifying what I though the previous poster meant.
Do a search for "mesothelioma lawyer" on overture, then click on the number one link. Congratulations you just made Overture $50.55. That's why they are worth $1.63 billion.