Overture To Buy AltaVista For $140 Million
from the there-goes-another-one... dept
As the new battle over search technologies heat up, it seems the old players – who have mostly been cast aside – are getting bought up. Just a few months after Yahoo’s decision to buy Inktomi, Overture (one of the “new generation” of search technology companies) has announced plans to buy AltaVista for $140 million. Overture, of course, supplies the paid-placement search features for many websites, but have rapidly toned down their own search portal offerings, so you have to wonder what they’ll do with AltaVista’s search site. AltaVista, of course, has struggled to find a place in the search world, even if they were the first of the big players and have tried a number of different strategies (remember their Google look-a-like Raging Search?). The article about the deal quotes Overture’s CEO saying they’d keep AltaVista and use it to test new products. I guess this means they’ll stop making fun of Google for running their own search site and “competing” with their own customers.
