Altavista and FAST together in ONE paid-inclusion program

...announced by Tim Mayer an SES in London, 4th of June

[oLeon]

For I cannot find a thread about this topic, I thought it would be a nice idea to post it. If it has been done before - sorry for doing it again.

Tim Mayer from Overture / FAST Websearch announced, that during this year the two paid inclusion programs from Altavista and FAST will be put together to a single one.
He didnīt say anything about the search engines, i.e. which of them will survive or not.

[Rumbas]

Thanks for the heads up oLeon.

It would be the natural way for OV/Fast/AV wouldn't it?

I read somewhere here on the board a few days ago that OV would offer PFI from within the client area at OV, but I can't dig it out now.

[heini]

Of course both will survive - AV as search destinations, ATW most likely as R & D showcase.

The PFI is mostly interesting because of Ex-Fast/Now-Overture partners, Lycos etc. AV still has a network of local sites, which lumped together should get quite a few searches per month.

What I would like to know is how they are going to deal with that AV PFI policy, where you had to pay for each local AV outlet seperately.

[mil2k]

A logical step in the right direction.

[markd]

As long as it's 'pay for inclusion', rather than some kind of psuedo 'pay for click or position' programme!

A combination may also pose some 'interesting' optimisation issues, not to mention geo-targeting options, which I still do not think SE's in general (let alone PFI programmes) handle very well.