Does overture back fill with ink?

Getting www1.overture.com referals without paying

[korkus2000]

I am not complaining but I am recieving what looks like overture ppc referals. I got into ink for free about 2 months ago. Now I am getting looksmart and overture referals. I know ink back fills looksmart but I am getting some good traffic with a www1.overture.com referal. I have not payed for inclusion or ppc for any SE or directories.

[agerhart]

Yes, Overture uses Inktomi results in some cases. look or the Ink logo at the bottom of the page

[korkus2000]

I am also getting www5.overture.com referals too. What is the difference?

[agerhart]

Same thing as www, www2, www3 for Google, but different uses.

[Receptional]

There could be two reasons that I can see for this. The first is some sort of load balancing by overture, who may be randomly using duplicate servers to feed their results to their partners or they MAY be using different servers to service different partners, delivering results according to the spec of the partner. (e.g. Yahoo.com displays different results depending on the geographical location of the surfer - neat huh?).

I suggest the latter may be the case, as it would give the likes of Yahoo a degree of control that they may need. In that case, someone COULD map all of Overture's servers to partners. But the - what would be the point? deciding market share of each partner/portal I guess.