Overture PPC Search Engine Internet Marketing

Overture is the unquestioned leader in Pay per Click or Pay for Placement search on the Internet. Formerly known as GoTo.com, Overture was founded in September 1997 by Bill Gross’ Idealab. In June 1998, the company launched its Pay-For-Performance search engine to enable advertisers to bid for search result placement on specific keywords relevant to their businesses. The company has approximately 80,000 advertisers, who bid for placement on relevant search results and pay Overture when a consumer clicks on their listing.

The company distributes its search results to many search engines on the Internet, including MSN, Yahoo! and AOL. Overture is based in Pasadena, California, with offices in New York and San Francisco, and subsidiary offices in the UK, Germany, Ireland, France, Japan and South Korea.

In February 2003, Overture made two very prominent acquisitions which are reshaping the search engine landscape. On February 18, it announced it had acquired Altavista, and on February 25, it announced that it had bought the Internet Search unit of FASTsearch. These acquisitions transformed Overture from a Pay for Placement search engine that supplied data to other search engines, into a diversified search engine company that features some of the most powerful and comprehensive search capabilities on the Internet. It also made it a very attractive tartget for acquisition; The company’s combined technologies and expertise move Overture forwards to the next generation of Internet search.

On July 14, 2003, Yahoo! Inc. announced it was buying Overture, in a $1.6 billion deal announced Monday. This agreement brings not just Overture, but also allows Yahoo to Integrate Inktomi, FAST, and Altavista into one massive, powerful search engine database.
The following search engines provide content to Overture:

  • Inktomi

The Inktomi results appear after all of Overture’s paid placement search results.

Among the search engines, search directories, and portals that Overture supplies data to are:

  • MSN
  • Yahoo!
  • Lycos
  • Netscape
  • AltaVista
  • InfoSpace