Overture Buys Fast Search 156
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."
Funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:MMmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
'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.
Re:MMmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Nope... as a PPC They'll probably ruin them both (Score:1)
Overture is not a money loser and it has been making plenty of money. It has had 200 million in revenue last quarter and actually posted a profit.
i wonder (Score:3, Funny)
Re:i wonder (Score:1)
No money spends sweeter than VC money, apparently.
Re:i wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:i wonder (Score:1)
Until google came along, the internet search was the biggest undertaking since the space race.
Google & Overture are both profitable (Score:1)
Because unlike the bubble companies they understood the web is all about finding information - not "content" or entertainment.
Hence banner advertising is a no-starter, because users are looking for information, and an irrelevant banner provides no extra information.
But a relevant text advert which matches what someone is looking for has a good chance of being clicked on and creating business.
In theory Overtures business model is actually better than Google's because it does not rely on technical advantage, but is based around auctioning adverts to the highest bidder + network effect: by offering more money to search portals from clicks than they would earn if the search portal set up their own pay-per-click.
Overture would have dominated the industry very nicely if it had remained a level playing field, but Google came along and improved its search technology by an order of magnitude over the others.
Now, Overtures business model is threatened by Google winning such a big percentage of the search market that its own portal customers combined cannot compete with Google. In this case no-one is prepared to pay high pay-per-clicks to Overture, and its competitive advantage from network effect starts to collapse.
So Overture is unlikely to use FAST or Alta-Vista as part of its own pay-per-click engine, and is much more likely to try to improve the genuine search results of its portal customers by offering them FAST/AV (quite possibly for free).
If users at for example MSN, instead of going over to Google to get good search results discover that the MSN search is good-enough (because its by FAST), then Overture will stem the threat and earn money from its pay-per-clicks at MSN.
They're up against it though, because Google have such a good brand now, and even if FAST were to have some arguable technical advantage over Google , unless its an order of magnitude advantage, Google's brand will remain number one and take a lions share of the whole market indefinitely.
And Google is evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
Googles good for the web.. but there is more to... (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [fastsearch.com] 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.
Re:Fast Search (Score:2)
Re:Fast Search (Score:2)
And AllTheWeb has a more flexible advanced search, IMO. I still go to Google first, but AllTheWeb is my backup ferret.
Re:Fast Search (Score:1)
A few years back I routinely used one of 4 or 5 different search engines depending on the type of query I wanted to do (keyword search, concept search, particular type of media etc.). I still have all those other engines bookmarked, but only ever use Google these days. Very much the multitool of search engines.
Re:Fast Search (Score:1, Funny)
Really? (Score:4, Informative)
(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.)
Who? (Score:1)
More analysis of the purchase... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More analysis of the purchase... (Score:1)
http://rss.com.com/2100-1023-985850.html?type=p
http://news.com.com/2
How nice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why would Google buy them? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How nice (Score:1)
But then the best thing about Google IMO is the 'Google Groups'. It's often more useful than websites due to less advertising - people don't try to stuff Groups searches to point to their newsgroup adverts.
So
Re:How nice (Score:2)
Never had a problem with their website search either. Google has become pretty good in detecting intentional "stuffing", and downgrades the relevant sites accordingly. Usually the top few matches that come up are pretty relevant to the query.
Dream on! (Score:2)
And once Overture has bought up all search engines that matter, they'll transform them into giant advertising portals...
Was there ever an engine that used reg. expression (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express (Score:1)
Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express (Score:1)
http://sitescooper.org/tao_regexps.html
Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything more would be pretty taxing on the server (especially with a monster like Google [google.com]) 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:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express (Score:2)
The one thing you'd want to do is disallow wildcards at the beginning of a word. That would require going through *all* words in your index. But so long as you have the wildcards in the middle or end there really isn't that much of a problem. For effeciency I could see requiring at least 2-3 letters at the beginning of the word prior to allowing wildcards. But that's about it.
The problem with most searching is that 90% of people using them just want simple queries. Yet those who want more accurate searching will do more advanced searching (i.e. wildcards, proximity, and so forth) Yet those are admittedly more expensive and more complex. But I personally think tha the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for the power user. I truly wish that Google, for instance, had more advanced query technology.
Re:Google is better (Score:1, Offtopic)
Moral: competition creates innovation
Re:Google is better (Score:2)
Bad competition creates absolutely nothing. People want less ads, not more.
Actually, you're using Overture... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Actually, you're using Overture... (Score:2)
Nobody in my dorm ever uses anything but Google. Seriously. Their mindshare is insane. "Search" isn't even a verb in common parlance here. One "Googles for" a web page now.
Re:Actually, you're using Overture... (Score:1)
That's me. I don't use anything but Google to search.
Oppertunity (Score:1)
and retire.
SealBeater
Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow! Overture has better earnings per share than Microsoft! [businessweek.com] They've also beaten eBay [itworld.com], 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!
Investors don't like Overture anymore (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
It's a lot more than $100/year at Overture. I know someone who runs a web based business, and they spend $400 per DAY for good search engine placement with Google and Overture.
Quarterly vs. Annual (Score:2)
investors beware (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:investors beware (Score:2, Informative)
google has the same thing, except ad-free:
Google Language tools [google.com]
Re:investors beware (Score:2, Insightful)
This could actually be a good Tech investment.
Re:investors beware (Score:1)
you sir, are covered in chocolate. i hope you plan on showering >>>>italian>>>>english>>>>getlteman , you are covered in chocolate. I hope program to them on overflowing
notice the spelling of gentleman,,,, the fish did that.......
now, you have fun with the phrase "If i had a dime for every dime that i found, i would have twice as many dimes" you can get some fun results..
All this rampant search engine consolidation... (Score:2)
There never has been a serious challenger to Google and there never will be -- I'm on the East Coast and I can hardly breathe from the vacuum of the hard computer science brain drain...
To Say there never will be... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Paid Listings? (Score:2)
Re:Paid Listings? (Score:1)
Re:Paid Listings? (Score:1)
Re:Paid Listings? (Score:1)
Carl
Overture's Motives (Score:2, Interesting)
Now that we know where their results come from, won't we steer clear?
They could have at least pretended to return relevant results.
Re:Overture's Motives (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, Overture sells paid listings, not relevance, although they do at least check out your site to make sure that the keywords you are registering are germain to your site's content.
Registering with Overture is smart because Overture influences other search engines. Alta Vista has long had a deal with them to take the top three Overture listings and place them above Alta Vista's own results. Even the mighty Google is influenced by Overture.
For example, before my company registered keywords on Overture, we couldn't be found on Google unless you search specifically on our name. Today, there is at least one keyword category where we have the top spot on Google (keywords we registered on Overture), and a number of others where we at least show up in the list.
For businesses that are frustrated with the search engine games, Overture is probably the easiest way to influence them.
With all that $$, why not buy Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, if I want the Ferrari, and I've got the dough, I don't get six or seven Chevys and consider myself the coolest kid on the block.
Re:With all that $$, why not buy Google? (Score:1)
Besides, Google being a private company, the owners can decide whether or not to sell - and they aren't selling. They are most likely waiting for a better economic climate to do their IPO.
If Google *does* IPO (Score:2)
Google is profitable, and doesn't really need tons of money to do anything at the moment. They also have an excellent future. I don't see them getting less important at all. If I were one of the Google owners, I don't think I *would* do an IPO. I'd hang onto my ownership of the company.
Re:If Google *does* IPO (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:If Google *does* IPO (Score:2)
Re:With all that $$, why not buy Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
Put them together how?
I'd imagine the work required to analyze the millions of lines of code that make up each search engine that Overture now owns, and then integrate all of them into one SOOPER-search engine, is going to end up being more difficult and taking longer than it would to write a fresh search engine from scratch.
My guess is Overture doesn't know what they're doing.
Re:With all that $$, why not buy Google? (Score:1)
When paying for advertising what is important is how many people see the advertising. You say Google is first and the others are running second. Can you back this claim?, and if all the others merged will Google still be first?. I don't think so. I much rather pay Overture since it seems it will get my ad to a broader audience than Google. But since many advertisers actually pay Google AND Overture it doesn't matter anyway.
I'm sticking with google. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Huge difference (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm sticking with google. (Score:2)
There are a few hundred million websites I've never visited, some of them that claim to have "invented" something, despite that I've been clicking on things since what? 1992? 1991 maybe?
Google makes a clear differentiation between the ads on the sides and the answers to my query in the middle. Overture's distinction is barely distinguishable if you're in a hurry (and who isn't?).
Commercials that look like content are insidious and annoying. They don't have good Q when they're done by radio personalities during their shows, nor when they're returned as search results.
Re:I'm sticking with google. (Score:3, Informative)
Now, Overture is still bad. (So is Doubleclick!) I think it can legitimately be criticized for abusing the patent system in its suit against Google.
Re:I'm sticking with google. (Score:2, Insightful)
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:I'm sticking with google. (Score:1)
overture.com is not a regular search engine. It is ONLY sponsored matches! You should really only go there if you want to buy something. Think of it as a big yellow pages. If you want to search for "velocity of unladen swallow" DO NOT go to overture.com. Would you look up a history of bathrooms in the yellow pages? Of course not, but you would look up services to remodel your bathroom. Their content is not camouflaged at all, just as the overture listings returned by Yahoo are labeled "sponsored matches". Would you call that camouflaged?
Overture's not hiding or camouflaging anything. As someone else put it, Overture is just a 21st-century yellow pages company.
Carl
Re:I'm sticking with google. (Score:1)
Re:I'm glad there is competition (Score:1)
Re:I'm glad there is competition (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm glad there is competition (Score:1)
I guess 'monopoly' is the latest word to be bandied about by socialists until it no longer holds any meaning.
Obligatory mods on crack alert! (Score:2)
Before anyone is allowed to moderate, they should have to provide proof that they can demonstrate, at least, a basic understanding of irony and/or sarcasm.
Re:Obligatory mods on crack alert! (Score:1)
Overture vs. Yahoo (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Overture vs. Yahoo (Score:1)
Potential (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Potential (Score:1)
Does anyone see Overture in their web logs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't notice for all the LOG FILE SPAM (Score:2)
Fake-up referrer fields set from www.########.com/FREE_WEB_MONITORING_SERVICE
User agent fields flogging domain name registration services to webmasters.
Pain in the arse for a small site just trying to look at stats for its visitors.
Re:Does anyone see Overture in their web logs? (Score:2)
If I go to Overture, or any of their customers, like yahoo, and search for my company, I easily find it, even though we haven't bought advertising there.
Yipppeeeeee!! (Score:4, Funny)
Overture is NOT a search engine (Score:5, Interesting)
Now for the fun part. Every time you click an Overture result, you cause the advertiser to pay Overture. As mentioned at SpamBattle [spambattle.com], this is a great way to screw companies that sell spam software or services:
Use the /. effect to bankrupt spammers!
Re:Overture is NOT a search engine (Score:1)
Use Overture for Good (Score:2)
I've been thinking about this for a while. They do checking so that you can't just keep clicking the link and costing the company more money.
While the slashdot effect would be good for a few URL's, it wouldn't be pervasive enough. It sounds to me like the perfect opportunity for a distributed client. Maybe something like SETI@Home that would trawl through results for undesirables and "click-through".
Actually, I'm hoping this gets modded up and some script kiddie puts it in the next version of Nimda/CodeRed/Slammer/Whatever.
Re:Use Overture for Good (Score:2)
Working around their abuse detectors (Score:2)
- you can hit them all once, but they do give you cookies, and I think they look at REFERER, so you want to enter those addresses in your browser yourself instead of clicking the link. If you want to hit them a few times, accept the cookies and clear them out in between.
Pigeons away! (Score:5, Funny)
I think not.
Re:Pigeons away! (Score:3, Informative)
Does this mean (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this a joke? (Score:1)