That sound is champagne corks popping at Yahoo!'s offices, not the cannons of 1812*! Yahoo! announced this week that it has purchased Overture for a staggering $1.6 billion. Not only will the move provide Yahoo! with a steady revenue stream from Overture's successful pay-per-click product, but it will also hand control of AltaVista and FAST over to Yahoo!, since their purchase by Overture earlier this year. Suddenly, Yahoo! has achieved a dominant place in the search engine marketplace, since it had already purchased Inktomi this year. It may now once again be able to challenge Google for search engine technology.
The move has cemented the dominance of three companies at the head of the search engine world. MSN are currently beta-testing their own robot technology, with a view to perhaps ditching one or more of their current search engine results providers, which include Inktomi. Yahoo! now controls Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST, and also run their own successful directory. The third major player is Google, perhaps the only one of the three to achieve its dominance through the success of its technology alone.
The final question is what does this all mean for Google. Rumours have abounded since Yahoo! purchased Inktomi that Yahoo! would switch from using Google's web results in their own web index to using Inktomi. Now they have two other options. Is this writing on the wall for the Yahoo!/Google deal? Other search properties, such as Lycos, which uses search engine results from FAST, might also face implications from the Yahoo!/Overture deal. Watch this space.* To read more about Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, visit http://www.classical.net / ~music / comp.lst / works / tchaikov / 1812.html
