Overture To Buy AltaVista

Nate writes "Overture announced that they bought AltaVista today for $140M in cash and stock. This follows closely on the heels of Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi. Considering the significant financial muscle of Yahoo and Overture, I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead. For those of you who aren't familiar with Overture, they are the 800-pound gorilla in the pay-for-placement listing market. When you search in Yahoo, those Sponsor Matches at the top are provided by Overture."

Fine and Dandy

That's all fine and dandy but Google is still by far the best way to search the web. It has more features than a geek's leatherman and is faster than Superman on speed.

So what if sometimes it dances a lil'bit.

I don't know much about Overture...

But I do know this... They can't make AltaVista suck much more than it has the past few years. It used to be my main search engine back in the mid-90s.

Money but not the brain power

Overture and Yahoo may have more money; however, no amount can make me want to go to a search engine that I can't view in the "Bork!" Language. Bork, Bork, Bork!

Press Release

The offical press release is here [corporate-ir.net].

So....

Which is it? Is Google a big brother monopolist or a scrappy underdog? I'm confused.

Re:So....

You should try fundamentalism .. that way you never have to deal with differing opinions.

Wanna lolly?

Re:So....

Is Google a big brother monopolist or a scrappy underdog?

Ok people, one last time:

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Google is the scrappy underdog, whereas Apple is the evil faceless corporation.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, the reverse is true.

Every day is Linux-is-good-day, except on Friday, when we all denounce RedHat for actually charging for some service they provide.

Oh. And vi is always better than emacs. :) (*ducks*)

*Sniff*

Bring a tear to my eye this news does. It is so 1999 and sweet of them. Brings back found memories of the old new economy. Hopefull all those $200K CFO's from back then will lift a spatula at their current job in honor of this event.

Are people that fickle?

I don't think this is going to make people switch. People don't automatically use stuff because a company has more money or we'd all be using OS/2 right now. It takes a mix of good marketing and good enough product quality to do that. Neither altavista or yahoo offer the latter anymore, so I'm not at all worried.

Missed it...

Overture should have bought Astalavista...seems they missed on spelling.

Re:Missed it...

But when it comes to the crunch, the pr0n search results are largely the same for both, and at the end of the day, isn't that what we're all here for?

Overture, send some dough my way!

I can find any word in the dictionary. 100 bucks. How about it?

Incredible news!

An unprofitable [fuckedcompany.com] Internet company buys another unprofitable [fuckedcompany.com] business company! Who says the Internet boom was over?

What?

You mean people are still using altavista? :-P

The day a seach engine uses "pay for placement"..

... is the day I stop using them.

Not really a constructive comment, but I'm slightly frazzled at the moment.

Re:The day a seach engine uses "pay for placement"

The day a seach engine uses "pay for placement"... is the day I stop using them.

Then I guess your search options are pretty limited, huh? Every major search engine now is either hooked up with Overture/Ah-ha/etc, or has their own fee for submitting. Except Google, but some of google's ads appear as lines that look very similar to their regular search results, and are directly above the search results (just like Overture's). The only major difference between how Google places theirs and how Overture et. al does theirs, is Google has a different background color for the ad text, making it a little more obvious that they are ads.

But it's not a huge mental leap to go from "background color" to "no background color", especially under pressure from advertisers, with in an increasingly smaller number of search engines to advertise with.

----

Yeah, I know there are more search engines popping up every day. And _you_ know that nobody ever goes to them either. When was the last time you used one of those other 15,000 search engines that all those spammers tell you they'll submit your site to for 50 bucks??

Financial muscle ?

Considering the significant financial muscle of Yahoo and Overture, I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead

Well unless Yahoo and Overture intend to pay me to do searhes, rather than the other way around, I'm not sure financial muscle has much to do with it. Google is fast, convenient and accurate. 'Nuff said.

www.goo .. damnit

www.goo ... i dunno, I think goo .. altavista and google.c .. er, Inktomi are going to have a rough ride.

Overture.

Curtain lights.

This is it.

The night of nights.

No more rehearsing and nursing a part.

We know every part by heart.

the good ol' days

and to think many moons ago in 1998 the domain name alone sold for 3.3mil.

I remember when it was the best...

But after google, the only redeeming feature it had was babelfish -- and now google translates webpages better, too.

Altavista became way too bloated and way too commercial, and it will wither and die away within 5 years. Everything it does, google does, but without the sense of bloat or loading 200k webpages full of ads.

Search Engines

Google may be the most popular geeks' search tool, but it's not my favorite. I much prefer engines like http://www.vivisimo.com/ and http://www.teoma.com/ and even http://www.alltheweb.com/ http://wisenut.com/ is also a really good engine and gettinng better every week. The best image finder is either http://www.ditto.com / or http://www.picsearch.com/ If you're after music and videos, then http://www.singingfish.com is for you...

for the lazy man, and introduction to the tag.

Same damn post, but I'm not so god damn lazy.

Google may be the most popular geeks' search tool, but it's not my favorite. I much prefer engines like http://www.vivisimo.com/ [vivisimo.com] and http://www.teoma.com/ [teoma.com] and even http://www.alltheweb.com/"> [alltheweb.com] http://wisenut.com/ [wisenut.com] is also a really good engine and gettinng better every week. The best image finder is either http://www.ditto.com/ [ditto.com] or http://www.picsearch.com/ [picsearch.com] If you're after music and videos, then http://www.singingfish.com [singingfish.com] is for you...

Who Cares if Google maintains their lead?

Really, why should you, or anyone else care if Google maintains their lead unless you happen to be employed by them?

If Yahoo! or Overture can produce a better service than Google does, we should applaud them and support their advances. I want the best service possible, I'm not particularly interested in which corporation provides it.

Don't get me wrong, I love Google, and I find new uses for it weekly it seems, but I'm not sitting in front of my computer rooting for them.

They're a business, just like every other business out there -- the only difference is that's it's geek chic to profess devotion to them.

Re:Who Cares if Google maintains their lead?

Well, I care.

Google has by in large done good thing for searching and the internet in general. They showed that you don't need $100 million ad budgets and hundreds of images. They provide a very good service to users (Search, Groups, etc) and they make a good profit at it. Their interface is very clean and neat, fast loading, and works with allmost everything. No only is their advertising not annoying like most sites, it is sometimes very helpfull. I click on google "placement" ads and never click on banner ads. They provide good searches for things like linux and most major universities. They are a "good" company, as far as companies go.

The effects of google on the internet can been seen. I have seen many sites trying to get away from the thousands of banners in favor of clean neat data in the google manner.

If this new company does all of this and provide better searches, then I will use them. But if they place ads in searches without making it very clear they are ads (unlike google) and use some ad-ridden interface and still "lead" then this won't be good for internet in general.

I like the google school of thaught when it comes to a internet company. Even if google fails, I would like to see this concept continue to do so well in the marketplace and with technical users.

But they're labeled

When you search on an Overture site like Altavista or Lycos, the paid matches show up at the top, but they are labeled as "sponsored matches". When you search Google, the paid matches show up on the right, and are labeled "sponsored links". I guess that's a little different, but not by a whole lot. So why is one "pay-for-placement" and the other isn't?

Re:But they're labeled

So why is one "pay-for-placement" and the other isn't?

Because I had been using Google for years before I ever read the results in the "sponsored links" section, whereas the whore-for-placement systems adds just one more tiny frustration in my day, having to make a slight mental effort to ignore the first results and go down to get to what I really want.

I sometimes go for the sponsored links, when I'm looking for something commercial (once every other blue moon), but for my everyday geek searches for futurama quotes and python lyrics, I don't want to be forced to read that commercial site X has great prices on python DVDs, I just want What I Was Looking For.

I use Google because

it offers what I want. Advertising dollars, PR efforts, and FUD can only mask an inferior product for a given time. In the end you will always return to the product you feel is better. If you still have that choice.

What do they get for their money?

The BBC [bbc.co.uk] states that Altavista once boasted 65M users per month. That doesn't seem very much to me when I use search engines 20-50 times a day, perhaps that may be above the norm but that must have been pre Google. Is there a list of search engine usage anywhere?

Re:What do they get for their money?

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

What was the motivation here?

AltaVista is clearly a dying brand as far as web-search goes; is overture just buying it for the traffic?

Digital?

I seem to remember that Altavista could be reached through a host on some old guard company's domain. Anybody have that handy?

Re:Digital?

Altavista started off (kind of like Yahoo, and Google itself in a way) as a happy accident. They wanted a way to showcase Alpha technology, so they created http://altavista.digital.com. They'd spider the web, and since Alphas were the premiere 64 bit chip, they'd show off "hey we have the Internet indexed on a single server with a single system image". But what was essentially advertising, became useful. Just as a lot of things lucked into, they never really guessed that the search engine would become a profit center, and it exploded in popularity. The old owner of the domain altavista.com (forgot what they did) got massive traffic when people would hear "Altavista" and just typed it in to the browser, and Netscape would do the http://www. and the .com bookends. Eventually Digital saw the site as more than just an ad for Alpha chips and made it a product itself, including selling the code for internal indexing and all that. They bought the altavista.com domain for a hefty fee, and now the site is there. I forgot how the whole Compaq purchase fits into the timeline. Eventually Digital/Compaq realized they were horrible at making money from it, and sold it to CMGI, I forgot who has it now. It's been dying a slow death, though babelfish translations are kinda fun.

At one time they were the best search engine, and their boolean searches - though with a clunky interface - gave the best filtering. Now google can claim that, even though they don't have the same degree of control of boolean searches. No one really has had an idea of what altavista should be, from DEC using it as an ad, then trying to "productize and monetize" it (to use buzzwords I hated from my dot.com dayze) to selling it to CMGI and have ad revenue and popups try to prop it up, to "I'm not sure what they're doing now but pretty sure they don't either."

Why should Google be special?

I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead.

If anybody else would provide better service, why should you want Google still have any lead if it becomes an inferior technology then?
Just because they have pulled off some nifty stuff doesn't mean they should be a sacred cow.

Why???

Altavista is still around?

I am sorry Altavista used to be cool, in 96 and then google came around, and I would rather use that. Google is Fast, simple, and doesnt have banner ads. I am sorry, I will not use anything other than google anymore. ok maybe Dmoz.org.....I still like google

Brand loyalty

I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead

Why? Are you an angel investor?

Seriously, who cares who has the "lead"? As long as I have good search engines to use and they manage to stay in business and pay their people reasonable salaries, I have zero interest in some business horse race. In fact I'd be nothing but pleased if another decent search engine could come along. I dislike being quite so dependent on one (and I am, utterly, dependent on Google at this point). Google is good but their approach can't possibly be the be-all-end-all. Before Google I thought Altavista was pretty good in fact, and right now I'd seriously regret being forced to use it if Google were down or unreachable.

I realise the article is about ad strategy rather than search strategy per se, and I really don't care about the ads as long as I can continue to ignore them. What I don't get is the fanboyism. They're a for-profit company. The fact that they've been very sane and rational in their approach so far is nice and even laudable, but it's not really some supererogatory wonderful act. If they weren't, I'd be that much less likely to use their service. Doesn't make them my teddy bear.

Whaaa?

Considering the significant financial muscle of Yahoo and Overture, I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead.

This sure seems like a stupid thing to hope for.

As has been said before, the reliance on Google really scares the hell outta me. Yeah, Google is great now, but shit happens, and shit happening to Google would really ruin me. Half my job security is based on scavenging for answers!

Since no one else seems to be able to compete with them, maybe in the spirit of competition we could talk Google into spining off an Anti-Google?

Astalavista

Woah! I read that as they bought Astalavista(as in .box.sk) for 140M, which is a hellofalot to spend on a very-dark-grey-hat website!

What's Yahoo!?

What's Yahoo!? Is it anytyhing like Google? Just kidding. But seriously, even thought AltaVista was once a great search engine (remember when Digital ran it?), you'd pretty much have to clone Google to compete with Google. Pay for placement just isn't in the cards these days.

Why?

Why do you hope that Google can maintain their lead? I would think competition would be good, and last i checked, AltaVista had a feature i really like that Google doesn't. If you give AltaVista a term in quotes, it will search for _exactly_ that string. Google on the other hand will often decide that punctuation is extraneous, and i'll frequently find myself wading through ten times as many pages as i need because Google decided to drop the "'" or "," or whatever.

Oh yeah, and AltaVista has Babblefish, that's cool too.

Yahoo for Yahoo

When you care to search the very best in unranked and non-shilled data. Anything else is just...well, you know.

goggle can suck my post-hole digger

Potential

The underlying importance of these moves is that major financial holders who possess a cunning internet prescence are buying up search engines (well Yahoo anyways). 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.

Offtopic, but really nifty (google worship)

Since I've seen a lot of posts addressing Google (usually along the lines of Best browser in the universe), I'll post a few interesting Google links:
http://www.google.com/options/ (googlize every aspect of your life) [google.com]
http://labs.google.com/gviewer.html (for us lazy people) [google.com]
http://labs.google.com/keys/index.html (who needs a mouse?) [google.com]
http://catalogs.google.com/ ( Shopping at stores -> Shopping with catalogs -> Shopping online -> Shopping with catalogs online (What is this world coming to?!?!)) [google.com]
Google is the best (It seems to be the general concensus) not only in speed/results, but also in development and creativity.

AltaVista appliance for intranet searching?

AltaVista used to be the best search engine; it's strength lies in basic text searching and it's incredible speed and scalability. Unfortunately it did not account much for the interlinked nature of the web and was easily subverted by web author tricks. These faults were mostly solved by Google.

However, just as Google offers a stand-alone embedded box, the Google Appliance [google.com], for use within corporate intranets, I suspect that is an area where AltaVista's technology could thrive much better.

Intranet searching and indexing is still a rather underexploited market. There's basically Microsoft's Index Server, flaws and all, the Google Appliance, and several good but not great minor choices such as ht://Dig [htdig.org]. If we could get an AltaVista appliance that ran under Unix (or at least not bound to Microsoft) and underpriced the Google Appliance I would have to believe that a lot of companies would take notice.

What *really* happened to AltaVista

AltaVista was a weird alagam of old-school DEC engineers [like in their late 50s old-school], Bay Area tech folks and East Coast MBA frat weenies. It was a deadly combination.

Rod Schrock and his Harvard b-school buds [his old roommate was one of our VPs], fresh from creating the Presario group at Compaq fled the sinking Compaq ship and headed for high ground in the Bay Area with dollar signs in their eyes. Knowing nothing about the Internet and what it meant or the realities of media business they decided to go after Yahoo instead of continuing their dominance of the search arena. They bought two absolute dogs [Zip2.com and shopping.com which was about 10 days from bankruptcy], then lost most of their product development team to another startup [where Louis Monyeaux (misspelled)] had just gone to. Undaunted, Schrock and friends dumped close to 100 million dollars total into the ill-fated "smart is beautiful" version of AV. A lot of that money went to USWEB CKS and Weidman Kennedy, $6 million for the overblown "launch event" in New York and the rest went to unqualified employees.

A few months later [spring 2000], the market really starts tanking. CMGI pulls AV's IPO for the third time and things get really stupid. The smart employees start leaving and the idiots take full command. Several months later, Schrock is finally booted by CMGI but the damage is already done.

I'd like to adknowledge the people who actually did their jobs and did them well during that period, namely the Search Engineering and Search Product Management groups [well, most of them but I won't name names here]. They were the ones who made AV great and fought futiley to keep it good. Fortunately, many of them landed at good places [like Barry at Google] but it was a long, unpleasant journey.

yahoo searches?

From the blurb: "When you search in Yahoo, those Sponsor Matches at the top are provided by Overture."

You mean you can search in Yahoo?

Search Often?

A lot about search engines lately. I think the obvious winner has already won and now only griping and complaining accompanied by cheerleading (see .sig for details) and smiling remains.

It's like the browser wars, but it hasn't been beaten to death . . . yet

Product sells

Google keeps their site clean and fast. They cruft it up as little as they reasonably can. Yahoo is a clot. Overture who?

What about BABELFISH?

Bablefish is provided by Systrans (a French company), yet I don't see Overture offering anything like it.

So maybe Systrans signed an exclusive with Alta-Vista and maybe thats what the big attraction is.

Google is improving its translation, so Overture has to match. I don't see anything else in Alta-Vista thats worth the money.

Altavista.dec.com Good -- Altavista.com Bad

Hopefully this can be a chance for Altavista to regain some of its previous wonderfulness that was squandered by the dot-commies. It might not overtake Google as the Ueber-search, but it would be excellent to see it rise from the ashes.

Registered software

Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to buy the software? Oops, I'm thinking of Astalavista.com

easier to avoid em' or harder?

I thought, great now it'll be easier to avoid them (Overture) like the plague, though maybe Overture has distribution that will make the search technology completely transparent? Thinking embedded searching in things..

Google? Love em, but uneasily keep waiting for the other shoe to drop when they stop wanting to burn cash (which one would think they must be doing a lot of). When do the suits take over?

competition

I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead.

Why? If they have more competition, they'll be more inclined to do whatever they can to increase the quality of their search engine to keep people coming back. And they obviously care, because the quality is how they got those people to begin with.

Good riddens...

CMGI is up 15% this morning. I bet they are glad they were able to unload Alta Vista.

I still don't understand what Overture is getting for $140 million. Isn't Overture in the pay for placement business and not the search engine business. Has someone told this to management? This seems like a mistake. I guess I need to send them a used copy of F'd Company.

some background...

June 1999: CMGI buys AltaVista [redherring.com] from Compaq for $2.3 billion in stocks.

"On Tuesday [the day after the sale], CMGI closed at $110.31, up $12.63, or 12.92 percent, with 13,921,400 shares traded.
'It's a great deal for them [CMGI],' says Ullas Naik, analyst with FAC Equities. 'AltaVista is an underappreciated and underused asset. CMGI can leverage that and cross-pollinate it with their existing companies and then they'll probably be able to spin it off as an IPO in six to nine months at a significant premium to what they paid.'"

December 1999, AltaVista files for IPO [ecommercetimes.com]. (DEC had made plans to have AltaVista go public in 1996, but recanted the following year.)

April 2000: IPO delayed [thestandard.com].

"CMGI was enjoying a midday bounce of nearly 6 percent to $55.13 [half of what it was not one year before, mind you]."

January 2001: IPO withdrawn [com.com].

"[During 2000, chief executive David] Wetherell's CMGI shares fell from a value of $2.1 billion at the beginning of the year to $100 million at year's end, a 95 percent decline."

I wouldn't worry about Google. It's made grown men cry. All over their worthless stocks.

Altavista vs. Google

In its day Altavista was the best search engine available by a wide margin. Sadly that day was about 5 years ago.

Altavista attempted to do what seemed like the obvious thing, and what most search engines did early on: it attempted to make hard searches easy.

Google's brilliant innovation was to do something far more useful, but less obvious: it attempted to make easy searches easy.

Put another way: Altavista competed with other search engines; Google competed with your bookmark file.

Back in 1996-97 I used to live by my bookmark file. Far fewer companies had actually managed to get hold of their company names as domains, important sites were tucked away in nonobvious places, and just finding what your were actually looking for was such a relief that you felt some real urgency in bookmarking the site and remembering how you got there.

In that time Altavista could almost always get me where I wanted to go, but often I have to look on page 2 or 3 of their search results for something that should have been on page 1.

Then came Google. Sure, the Web had evolved, and companies had figured out how to get their sites onto more intuitive domains. But mainly Google did a great job of making obvious things easy to find. Their "I'm feeling lucky" button is by far the link on the Web that I click on most often. I still have a bookmark file, but I hardly use it. My bookmark file loads only slightly faster than Google, it's less complete than Google, and frankly listings are in a more useful order in Google than they are in my bookmark file.

But let's not lose sight of the fact that early on in their competition, Altavista was _better_ than Google at what Altavista was trying to do. It's just that Google was trying to do something more useful. When it came to really hard searches -- looking for a particular file name used within a particular Linux device driver source tree, or looking for an old classmate when all you have is a very common last name, a place they used to live, and a hobby they used to have -- Altavista beat Google hands down. And no one to this day has an advanced search syntax as sophisticated as what Altavista had, despite the crappy (and undocumented) interface.

No, at the time that their Raging Search was launched, their best attempt at a Google competitor, they were better for _hard_ searches.

Google had gotten better, even at the hard searches, and Altavista hasn't been maintained. But this is a sad day.

The opportunity is still out there. Google will continue to win the competition with my bookmark file. But someone could still do an uncluttered, no-ad or low-ad search engine, aiming to make hard searches easy, and do better than Google. It's not as big a niche as CMGI needed, but it is a niche worth having.

The good old days and stupid babelfish tricks

Way back when altavista was the only game in town, around 1998, babelfish was the only useful translation mechanism. I happened to come across this fun post [google.com] which took the output of fortune, fed it to babelfish to translate into a different language and then fed it back to babelfish to translate back to English. Using command-line switches you could specify French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.

This examples goes from English to German to English to French to English. It was hours of fun to see fortune cookies go from (this is all from the groups.google post):

Flon's Law:

There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is
the least bit difficult to write bad programs.

Gesetz Flon: Es gibt nicht jetzt und nie wird, eine Sprache sein, in
der es das wenige Bit ist, das schwierig ist, falsche Programme zu
schreiben.

Law Flon: There is not now and never, a language will be, in which it
is few bits, which are difficult to write false programs.

Loi Flon: Il n'y a pas maintenant et jamais, un langage sera, dans
lequel c'est peu de bits, qui sont difficiles d'ecrire des programmes
faux.

Law Flon: There is now and never, a language will be, in which it is
little of bits, which are difficult to write false programs.

I had a slightly sanitized version of the code (strict, warn, my variables, etc.) from the one listed in the c.l.p.m newsposting, and I could look for it on my CDs (this is from an ex-employer) if anyone's interested.

Ah, the memories.....

good for overture

This is pretty interesting. The value chain for a search engines looks like so...

Consumer - you, me, the one who lays down their credit card for a product.
->Advertiser - ex. stores.yahoo.com. They produce a product to sell.
-->Affiliate Network - ex. BeFree, CJ, LinkShare. These guys manage the relationship between Advertisers and Publishers.
--->Publisher - These guys find things to sell on stores.yahoo.com and buy eye balls from search engines like overture and google.
---->Search Engine / Ad Network- ex. google.com, overture. These guys sell search placement to Publishers and provide the search engines for those ads.

Before Overture bought Altavista, Overture was just an Ad Network. They took money from Publishers and gave it to search engines like aolsearch, msn, etc. Now that Overture and AV are one company they are their own search engine, just like google is their own search engine and ad network. Anywho, as the money trickles down from the consumer to the search engine, the one who makes out with the lions share is the search engine. It's the only piece of this puzzle that lacks competition. If Overture is able to better compete with google then cost for search placement should decrease and everyone else will benefit.