02 May 2002 | Author: Iain Macaulay

AOL drop Overture in favour of Google Adwords

AOL, the Time Warner owned company with 34 million members worldwide, have announced that they are dropping the pay per click links from Overture in favour of the Google pay per click text ads, and the Google search engine database.

Google's search technology will now power the search areas AOL, Compuserve, AOL.com and Netscape from this summer. Although this is good news for Google it means that Inktomi now have only MSN left as their only serious search portal after the reconfiguration of Looksmart.

Googles new pay per click Adwords program is now the first serious challenger to Overture in North America.

Although this is a big blow to the Overture service, they have recently signed a three-year contract with Yahoo.com to supply pay per click results, and have extended the current deal with MSN for a further year, so all is not lost. Plus they will still be supplying results to AOL in the UK France and Germany.

AOL had been one of the last few search portals to offer a truly Boolean search. Whether this will remain after Google take over is unclear. But if they do accept the full Google package then what is clear is that it will undoubtedly benefit AOL users.

On the down side, sites that did have good listings in Inktomi will loose visitors while Google's will receive a hefty boost.

How this sees the future of Overture developing is unclear. With some analysts stating that the contract with Yahoo more than offsets any lose of AOL. While on the other hand, with Overture shares looking highly volatile this year, it has been left an open suggestion that Overture supply their own algorithm based search facility.

How this will transpire for the UK market of pay per click results is unclear. Overture loosing out to Espotting to supply Yahoo UK was a big surprise in itself. Is the door is now open for Pay Per Click to become even more highly competitive? Is this now the start of all the major search engines starting to create their own versions of the service? It is no secret that it is a highly lucrative venture and becoming more and more necessary and important along side standard SEO services. Anyone looking at Overtures turn over for last year can testify to that.

But what ever happens Bigmouthmedia will be keeping a close eye on proceedings to advise their clients on the best options and choices available.

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