Overture Purchases Altavista

• Feb. 18, 2003

Overture has signed a deal to purchase search provider Altavista for $140 million.  The new deal would provide Overture with the ability to use crawler based technology to further improve their own customer relations by offering not one but two forms of internet search results.

 

While Overture already offers Pay Per Click search results to their customers, they will be able to offer them spidered search results, much like any crawler based engine.  The difference being that Altavista charges for inclusion into their database.

 

The new deal also puts more pressure on Google as Overture has sufficient funds to take Google on and try and become the premiere search provider on the web.

 

In addition, aside from possibly breaking the Google monopoly, Overture can now supply crawler based results to those partners who may have been wondering what to do with the Yahoo!/Inktomi deal (which goes before shareholders in about a month for ratification).

 

One also wonders how Yahoo! will react to this deal.  Traditionally Overture and Yahoo! have had a good working relationship.  Now it appears that Overture will become a direct competitor of Yahoo!

 

Does this purchase signal the demise of yet another site which meant so much to the internet in its early stages?  I think not.  If anything the deal will fortify Altavista’s future, whether it is as Altavista, or some other name (Overvista??).  In any case, the purchase of this otherwise dead engine by one of the ‘net’s largest players will have huge implications on the Search Engine Optimization industry.

 

Rob Sullivan

Searchengineposition.com – the Search Engine Positioning specialists