Overture Purchases FAST/Alltheweb

• Feb. 25, 2003

Last week we announced that Overture bought AltaVista and we thought that was big news.  In fact it was.  It’s not too often that one search service buys another one.  The last few months the news has been about which search engine is now providing results for another.  That trend started to change when Yahoo bough Inktomi quietly just before Christmas 2002 (that deal has to be ratified by Inktomi shareholders in March).

 

Overture is involved in another purchase this week.  Today a deal was announced in which Overture would acquire the web search services of FAST/Alltheweb.

 

The deal will cost Overture $100 million but will provide yet another revenue stream for Overture.  Plus it will help make great inroads in the European market for Overture as FAST already supplies results for many popular European portals.

 

Also, combined with the AltaVista deal, Overture will be able to provide their clients with a large base of pay per click, paid inclusion and crawler based results.  By using AltaVista’s paid inclusion and FAST’s improved crawler results, Overture has become your one stop shop for search engine results.

 

This bodes well for engines like AOL who currently purchase results from Overture and Google.  Now they can get results solely from Overture if they like, or they can begin a bidding war between Google and Overture to establish who will be sole provider of said results, while potentially lowering their costs associated with providing those results.  Also, sites like CNN.com, Amazon.com and the like who currently provide search results can also take advantage of integrated one stop shopping with Overture.  I see a huge market for Overture in these “Secondary” types of search engines, whose primary goal isn’t search, yet they like to be considered as a single source of web information.

 

It looks like the search engine war is just beginning to heat up – with the 2 combatants being Google and Overture.  Who would have thought a few years ago when GoTo.com relaunched itself as Overture that it would have grown to become one of the web’s largest search providers, considering that most people in the industry said pay per click wouldn’t last.  Even as recently as last year Overture was a drop in the bucket compared to engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN for search traffic.  Within 2 weeks it went from a drop to a potential flood.

 

Just another twist in this soap opera called the Web.

 

Rob Sullivan

Searchengineposition.com - the Search Engine Positioning specialists