Yahoo! hires Overture executive

• Jan. 28, 2003

What is Yahoo! up to?

 

Back just before Christmas Yahoo surprised everyone by announcing they had purchased Inktomi Search service (See our article about this here).  This led to much speculation that Yahoo! intended to eventually replace their outsourced search results partner Google with it’s own in house version.

 

This is all still up in the air, however, as they have a long term legal commitment to Google.

 

Today they confirmed that Yahoo! has hired away an executive from commercial search company Overture, raising questions about the Web portal's own paid-search ambitions.

 

Since Overture supplies Yahoo! With a majority of it’s paid search results, this latest move again makes one wonder what Yahoo! is planning.  Perhaps the recent moves (Inktomi deal, and recruiting an Overture search executive) are their attempts at re-establishing themselves as a viable search portal?

 

Again, we will have to wait and see what else Yahoo! pulls out of their hat.

 

You can read more about the new Yahoo! deal here.

 

Rob Sullivan

rob@searchengineposition.com