Search engine news w/e Feb 28, 2003

• Feb. 28, 2003

And here I thought last week was going to be the big week in search engine news.  Boy was I wrong.

 

Last week I mentioned the surprise purchase of Altavista made by Overture.  After all, for a company like Overture to shell out $140 million for a dying portal one begins to wonder what is going on. Our water cooler has never seen so much buzz.

 

Well this week, the water cooler talk went into overdrive when Overture went shopping again.  This time they bought FAST.  FAST, for those of you who don’t know, is a crawler based search engine which has a ranking system similar to Google.  In a conference call with investors, board members for Overture outlined their plans for the 2 recently acquired assets.

 

Essentially, Overture is going to use FAST and Altavista technology to help them define and build new market opportunities.  One of the ideas that they are working on is called targeted PPC advertising.  In essence, Overture would supply PPC results to their partners when searches are performed for products or services in similar industries.  That means if you were to search for “computer help” on a partner site, you would probably get Overture results for computer dealers, software vendors and so on.  Virtually any related industry has the potential to display ads for searches.  They announced they’d be rolling this technology out later this year or early next year.

 

Google, on the other hand, announced yesterday that they have a similar program called targeted AdWords.  It works under the same premise, but theirs is ready now, and is already working on their partner sites.

 

In addition to this, Google was recently awarded a patent on their search algorithm.  That protects their intellectual property (their algorithm) from copying and other forms of abuse their competitors may use.  You can read more about the Google news of the week on our site, or by clicking this link.

 

In the maybe-not-search-related-but-will-have-a-definite-effect topic, Ted Turner is busy selling off shares of AOL/Time Warner.  Since he left his posting at the company he has sold almost 8 ½ million shares of his former company.  He still holds well over 100 million shares, but at this rate he could be done with the company by summer.  His continued sell off is also scaring away other investors in the company, causing share prices to drop, leaving a somewhat uncertain future for some, or all, of the company.

 

So, I wonder what next week will bring?

 

Rob Sullivan

Searchengineposition.com

Search Engine Positioning specialists