Article: "Searching For Answers"

A Couple Hundred Words on the Future of Overture

[rubble88]

From the article, "While the tone of the [Shareholders]meeting was upbeat, and Overture CEO Ted Meisel outlined his positive outlook for the company over the next few years, questions still linger about the future of Overture."

Also from the article, "During the meeting, Meisel discussed Overture's loss to rival Google of what Wall Street analysts rumored to have been a $60 million contract with AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online. That figure practically doubles what Wall Street watchers said was Google's revenue for all of last year.

"That was about Google's brand," Meisel said. "It's unfortunate. I think it was a mistake for AOL." The mistake Meisel was referring to was that Google searches list results with Google's name identity and not the customer's. Overture, which refers to its customers as "partners," does not brand searches with the Overture name."

Full-Text at:
http://www.sgvtribune.com/business/articles/0502/29/biz01.asp

[chiyo]

interesting and Meisel's interpetation of it as a mistake is credible however - especially when you look at the yahoo/google partnership.

But surely we are looking at two TOTALLY different models here. AOL is taking both Google's "PPC" system AS WELL as the key non-PPC database. All Overture can offer AOL re their main search is paid listings (albeit with good revenue implications), a severely limited listings size, and results ranked by how much an advertiser pays rather than relevance. Not slagging of on PPC's generally, but a small selection of paid for results is a completely different animal than a giganormous database of pages ranked by relevancy and citation frequency. If AOL's startegy is to keep people "at home" longer, and increase their value to their users long term, going with Google makes absolute sense. If AOL were looking for short term revenue and reducing the importance of mass market search in their brand, then Overture makes more sense.

So while Meisner's observation has a lot of truth, his (at least public) statement misses the point, as he assumes that both search offerings are of the same nature, value, and target. PPC services (and their best customers) do try to spin that PPC results ARE relevant because of some editorial and that "if the pages were not getting value for clicks, people would reduce bids and therefore this ensures relevance. That is a furphy of course, and assume that the bigger the marketing budget you have the more useful and relevant your pages are. That may apply for users searching for shopping or commercial sites or places to spend their money, but that does not comprise a great majority of search users.