How will Overture buying AltaVista affect Google?

[finditnow]

Overture announced plans to acquire pioneering search company AltaVista. How will this affect GOOGLE?

[indigojo]

Have you got a source for this?

[indigojo]

Found it [corporate-ir.net...]

[jeremy goodrich]

I'd say this is a good source:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Posted this morning...or afternoon? :)

How does it affect Google? Well, I guess it shows that they are still king of ad free serps...when will the FTC make a decision on those XML feed programs is anybody's guess.

When / if they do make a decision though - Google's the only one of the majors with out 'dirty serps'.

[rfgdxm1]

What does this mean for Google? At the moment, I'd say not much. Only if Overture pours a lot of money into Altavista and makes Altavista a serious competitor is this relevant.

[TheComte]

AltaVista used to be my favorite, but now they seem to be mostly irrelevant. Their serps are stale and their referrals are mostly non-existent. Maybe Overture will give them a kick in the butt, but I doubt it.

[rfgdxm1]

This seems to me to be very similar to Looksmart buying out Wisenut. I don't think the logic here is that either company believes the search engine by itself is a moneymaker. In the case of Altavista, this was a once popular search engine that now is pretty moribund. From my logs, Altavista is even behind AskJeeves. In the case of Wisenut, they have never been more than a minor, second rate search engine. I just checked some Wisenut SERPs and they are apallingly bad. For my site a hit from Wisenut is a rarity. My guess is that both these acquiring companies are planning on incorporating the search engine technology they are buying such that they themselves can become serious competitors in the SE game. It might be easier to buy an existing SE and rebuild it rather than try creating a new one from scratch.

[Powdork]

AltaVista's advanced algorithmic search technology, which crawls the Web and returns relevant search results in response to users' queries

Huh?;)