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!
