So, everybody is talking about
Google and their "top of the line" search technology,
are they gonna be the only search portal in future? You bet there's no definitive
answer to it, but many analysts think so. They have been pretty good when it comes
to the search results and they have released a bunch of great tools to make their
technology one of the best technologies in the market. But is everybody else idle?
Let's see how active Google rivals have recently been.
In commercial search technology, Pasadena, CA based
overture has been through a very active
week and a couple of great acquisitions.
After
buying
Palo Alto, CA based altavista
last week, for $140M, they
announced
buying FAST, the small Norwegian search company for $100M.
What it means is they are gonna own
alltheweb.com which many people have
switched to from Google for their search needs.
Overture's stock was done 20 percent
after altavista's news and now 11 percent lower than that after their acquisition of
FAST. Seems the're gambling big time!
Overture is the world's leading provider of Pay-For-Performance. search on the
Internet. It created the market for Pay-For-Performance search by redefining
how businesses market online. The company enables advertisers to bid for placement
in its search results on terms that are relevant to their businesses. The company
formerly known as GOTO.com was founded in 1997 which makes it older than Google.
Yahoo! on the other hand is not idle at all. They
bought inktomi last december to recover their power in the search industry. Yahoo!'s
web search is powered by Google and the results are shown after their own listings.
It's now up to news portals and other web sites to decide where to go. Overture and
Google both have access to both sophisticated paid listings and top of the line
search technologies. In light of Overture's new acquisitions, news web sites like CNN
which uses Google's search but Overture's paid listings can pick one of them for
both search and paid listing purposes. Seem the fight for search dictatorship is
getting hotter and hotter!
