Overture inks 2 year deal with Sympatico

[oilman]

It looks like Canadian mega-portal Sympatico.ca will shortly be dropping Google results and going with 'algorithmic search results' from Overture combined with the usual PPC listings.

Under terms of the agreement, Overture will serve up to five paid placement search listings at the top of the Sympatico.ca search results pages and three at the bottom. Additionally, Overture will provide algorithmic search results (in which a search engine crawls the Web and returns relevant results in response to users' queries) on the remainder of the search results page through its recent acquisition of the Web search unit of FAST, a leading search provider. The agreement also covers paid inclusion in which businesses pay a fee to have their Web pages frequently refreshed by FAST's Web crawler and included in its index.

More in the press release [corporate-ir.net].

[jeremy goodrich]

Intersesting the way your quote reads, Oilman. You'd think Overture didn't buy Altavista or that they had bad technology or something ;) Too funny.

Looks like a good move for the Overture (soon to be Yahoo as well?) team. Perhaps more & more other firms might fear the growing might of Google as a stand alone destination, thus dropping Google for fear of fueling the rise of a rival?

[TravelSite]

I think most firms are interested in two main things from search providers:

1. How much money they'll make
2. Are results good enough to keep their users & to keep their user happy (<i>most<i> have figured out that they need decent results)

Heres how Google fairs:
1. PPC adwords - Percentage given to partner
2. Good (Google) Results - Charges for it

Heres how overture fairs:
1. PPC overture - percentage given to partner
2. Good (Fast) Results - FREE? or Percentage Giving to Advertiser? - Or Lower Charge (as they get revenue from PFI)?

Either way Overture would appear to be able to give more to publishers...and Google doesn't want to go down PFI (I hope). Overture could take more partners from Google.