Yahoo!, in full Yahoo! Inc., global Internet services provider based in Sunnyvale, California. It was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University in California. Yahoo! provides users with online utilities, information, and access to other Web sites.

Yahoo To Buy Overture

Yahoo is to acquire Overture by the end of 2003, in a move that has repercussions throughout the search landscape.

Yahoo has announced an agreement to buy Overture, in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $1.6 billion. The purchase is expected to close by the end of the year.

The planned acquisition is the latest in a series of search consolidations that have happened over the past few months. In March, Yahoo completed its acquisition of Inktomi. In April, Overture completed its purchases of AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

Combining Inktomi, AltaVista & AllTheWeb

If the acquisition goes through, Yahoo will be the first company to ever own three distinct crawler-based search engines. Yahoo currently owns Inktomi already, and in purchasing Overture, it will gain AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

(By the way, runner up goes to Excite, which in 1996 purchased both WebCrawler and Magellan. That gave Excite its own crawler plus WebCrawler’s spider. Magellan was a human-powered directory, by the time of its purchase).

How do you put all these together? Yahoo’s spin is that there are parts of all of them that will be used, somehow, as part of an eventual single system.

“While we continue to go forward with our integration and strategy with Inktomi, we believe AltaVista and [AllTheWeb” complement the Inktomi assets. [AllTheWeb” has important international assets, and AltaVista is a leading multimedia provider on the internet,” said Weiner. “Also, you’re picking up a lot of engineering talent, as it applies to web search.”

The first part of the response sounds similar to what Overture said after they bought both AltaVista and AllTheWeb, the idea that somehow, each fills in a missing piece that the other lacks. The reality is that these were all independent, functioning systems. Rather than being complementary to each other, they duplicate each other. What’s really going to happen is that the best pieces from each will be kept.

Yahoo still hasn’t released Inktomi results onto its own site, presumably because it’s still doing development work behind the scenes. It may also be that the deal with Google may impose some undisclosed restrictions as to when Yahoo can bring in other results.

Regardless, Yahoo will keep moving ahead to develop Inktomi independently of Overture’s plans for AltaVista and AllTheWeb. That’s because the two companies can’t work together on integrating all three crawlers until after the deal actually closes, which isn’t expected until toward the end of this year.

As for Overture, it’s already well enmeshed in combining the AltaVista and AllTheWeb systems. That work will have to continue, because it could turnout that the Overture-Yahoo deal might not get approved.

So, crystal ball time. I would expect that over the coming months, you’ll probably see Inktomi go live on Yahoo. Meanwhile, in the coming months, you’ll probably see AltaVista and AllTheWeb switch over to using a single crawler-built index — let’s call it the Overture index.

By sometime early next year, I would expect that work to combine the Inktomi and Overture indexes would be well along. So around mid-to-late 2004, we might finally see the single “Yahoo” index emerge, for use on Yahoo, AltaVista and AllTheWeb — assuming those other two sites are still around.

As for paid inclusion, one eventual index means there should be only one eventual program, rather than the three separate programs that now run for Inktomi, AltaVista and AllTheWeb. Furthermore, I actually think you may see the demise of paid inclusion happen altogether. I’ll explore this more in a future article, but here’s the short summary of my reasoning.

Paid inclusion came about because companies like Inktomi had no other way to offer revenue to potential partners. Now that Yahoo owns Inktomi and will own Overture, it doesn’t need to dive into the messy world of paid inclusion to monetize its pages. Instead, it can continue along with paid listings, as it has already done with Overture.

Instead, I think what will happen is that for commercial queries, you’ll see more of the page dominated by paid placement listings. I also think you’ll see paid inclusion survive but really as an extension of paid placement. It will be a way for advertisers to have their web sites scanned for content, then be able to show up for terms that no one is explicitly bidding on, for a flat rate.

When did Verizon buy Yahoo?

Yahoo!, in full Yahoo! Inc., global Internet services provider based in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Communications since 2017. 

Verizon Media is a division of Verizon Communications that focuses on media and online business. Verizon Communications acquired AOL in 2015. When Verizon Communications purchased Yahoo! in 2017, it merged AOL and Yahoo! into a subsidiary named Oath Inc.

In December 2018, Verizon announced it would write down the combined value of its purchases of AOL and Yahoo! by $4.6 billion, roughly half.

Verizon renamed the company Verizon Media in January 2019. Within Verizon Media, AOL and Yahoo! maintain their respective brands.

On May 3, 2021, Verizon announced that 90 percent of the division would be acquired by Apollo Global Management for roughly $5 billion, and would simply be known as Yahoo! following the closure of the deal, with Verizon retaining a minor 10% stake in the new group.