Yahoo to buy out Overture...a discussion starter.

[dmcgill]

Below in quotations is a press release taken from Overtures front page.  I have made my comment, I'd like to hear yours.

“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.”
The question here is what will this do for the Wide World Web?  

Since the development of the Internet freedom of expression / speech advocates have tried desperately to make sure the Internet remains a free source of expression ideas and thought.  When Yahoo was launched it was nothing more that a group of URL’s that were collected and placed in a searchable database.  Since then, the advertising and business promotion potential of Search Engines has caused this industry to become one of the largest money making business in the world.  Banner ads, pop-up ads, scrolling java script and other tricks have turned the Search Engines of today into a giant money generating machine and the prices for advertising on the Internet have grown to the point that only those companies with large advertising budgets can put up effective campaigns using the mighty traffic generating engines.
Pay-Per-Click advertising became a new way to advertise, with its technology of being able to bid on the use of keywords.  This became viable for smaller companies since it pushed targeted visitors to your sites.  Someone selling dandelion herbicides could be directed to websites that sold that product due to the very specific terms of the search.  Overture was the first Pay-per-click search that became a major success.  
Google’s search technology is by far the best (in this writers perspective) for Meta search.  Drawing on several databases, DMOZ being one, Google was capable of returning fantastic search results.  Google has become a real competitor as well as leader in the Internet world of Search Engines.
So what will the overall outcome be of the joining of Overture and Yahoo?  Will it be a success or a massive failure?  
My personal opinion is this: It may succeed but we may be looking at the following problems.
1.   It will be harder for small business to become listed.
2.   It will be totally up to this giant Search Engine as to how it ranks your site, lists your business or promotes.  
3.   Because of opinion #2. This will eliminate much of the objectivity of the Internet and instead of the public judging the content of your site, Yahoo will do it.
4.   People will begin turning to smaller Search Engines such as Web World, Kanoodle and Geniknows.com for their advertising.

I hope that the Internet watchers are watching very closely.  Any comments?
dmcgill

[SensoVision]

Dmcgill, actually this topic was already raised here some time ago, here and also here. there is more opinons on this subject is avaiable.
By the way it seems that Altavista could be keeped by Yahoo, check out this article. Hope same thing will be with ATW.

[dmcgill]

Interesting... AV had almost disapeared off the map.  I used to rank pretty high with them.

[SensoVision]

it's disappear but not for me, since I still see clicks from it, it's popular somwhere so it would be good to see if it would become active again.

2.   It will be totally up to this giant Search Engine as to how it ranks your site, lists your business or promotes.
3.   Because of opinion #2. This will eliminate much of the objectivity of the Internet and instead of the public judging the content of your site, Yahoo will do it.

BTW, I think that Yahoo will push sites which listed in their directory to top results or at least them good priortity withing their search, this would make listing with them more useful and will force much more people to spend 300 bucks on it...

4.   People will begin turning to smaller Search Engines such as Web World, Kanoodle and Geniknows.com for their advertising.

I think those who like Overture have no reason to go away to other companies... also it seems that Overture developing something similar to AdWords and if it also accept small sites as AdWords do there will be no reason to go away IMHO...

[greg]

i've yet to see a result from AV actualy. the search engine i am doing best in is actualy MSN, followed by google, and a very close ATW.