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Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - ), a leading global Internet company and Overture Services, Inc. (Nasdaq:OVER - ) a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet, today announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Yahoo! will acquire Overture. Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding common share of Overture will receive 0.6108 shares of Yahoo! common stock and $4.75 in cash, reflecting an aggregate purchase price of approximately $1.63 billion, or $1.52 billion net of Overture's March 31, 2003 cash balance, less the amounts earmarked for their two recently closed transactions.
I'd guess MSN will develop its own PPC system along with its search engine.
Just arrive in an email from overture
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 1:57 pm (utc) on July 14, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry no email excerpts [/edit]
Yahoo Directory
Overture PPC
Inktomi Search
Altavista Search
FAST Search
surely the monopolies and mergers people must been interested
[edited by: papamaku at 2:00 pm (utc) on July 14, 2003]
jd
Will yahoo keep same format for Fast? Will it run them separately, so many questions
Where is yahooguy when u need him!
IMO MSN missed a real good oppurtunity , by buying Overture they may have their hands on two algorithmic search companies ( alta + fast) and a top PPC provider .
This would have greatly accelerated MSN's work towards their Grand Search Ambitions
Should be really interesting watching MSN now.
I reckon they'll be picked up by someone, perhaps like AOL.
Surely all those Yahoo competing portals that use Overture are going to be looking for a way out. That could create a number of opportunities for the likes of E-Spotting.
The interesting part for me is Ink, AV and FAST all ending up with the same owner. I'd say the curtains will come down for at least one of those.
This aspect also creates problems for MSN and other portals. The number of 'proven scale' search options just shrunk. No wonder MSN is developing search for themselves.
For MSN, it's quite a big drama I suspect. Yahoo now own both ends of their search sandwich, leaving a horrible tasting filling in Looksmart. Horrendous.
My main fear is actually that Yahoo get carried away with their PPC ownership, and wreck their search experience as a result. I would hope that they would have learned the lessons of where that path leads by actually watching the dogs dinner unfold at MSN (who have been left with only a handful of cards, and pretty poor ones at that).
Just three players left: Google - Yahoo - MSN
Just wonder why Yahoo bought Inktomi in the first place..
I think Google is going to start advertising pretty soon.
Mainly for their toolbar.
Maybe they have their eyes on the Big Boy Google , who knows whats happening behind the curtain :)
Anything is possible and there are no permanant enemies or friends in business :)
Steve
It is creating competition against Google - Yes, but at the same time Inktomi, Alltheweb and Altavista all owned by Yahoo - should be the death of two of these IMHO (or of course breaking them up again?).
Makes you wonder how far things are planned in advance.
Yahoo may have been aiming to take over Inktomi followed by Overture to get both PPC and Crawlable web results but had no intention to acquire Altavista and Alltheweb.
Interesting times.
The big loser is obviously MSN who are now paying Yahoo!for Ink & Overture search services. I look forward to seeing MSN complete their search engine and setting up (or buying) a PPC.
However, it will sure hurt a lot to some - like eSpotting, as mentioned ;)
This is certainly going to be an interesting year. Google just got chopped down another notch. They need to get out of the tech arena and start throwing around some corporate muscle.
