Overture Acquires AltaVista In £88 Million Deal

Pay-for-performance search company Overture has acquired internet search engine AltaVista for £88 million in cash and stock.

The company claims that the acquisition will allow it to provide additional marketing opportunities for advertisers, as well as making it possible to test and refine new products in a live setting.

Overture hopes that Alta Vista’s relevant search results will complement its own commercial search products. However, Martin Child, managing director of Overture UK, insists that there are no plans to scrap the Alta Vista brand.

He said: “It is early days but the acquisition will have little impact on advertisers as we already provide search results for Alta Vista’s site, and the two companies will remain separate. The key area for Overture will be using Alta Vista’s paid-inclusion products and testing new services on AltaVista.”

In 1998, technology and e-commerce solutions group, CMGI, paid around £1.5 billion for AltaVista, which relaunched last year in an attempt to recapture users and increase its popularity (see Freeserve And Alta Vista Cut Back On Pop-Ups).

Alta-Vista has suffered at the hands of the increasingly popular Google search service, which recently secured a deal with NTL to power the search on its home page Ntlworld.com.

Recent research from web analysts, WebSide Story, has called the future of search targeted marketing into question, by revealing that the majority of internet users go directly to websites, as opposed to using web-links or search engines (see New Research Questions Search Targeted Marketing).

Oveture: 0207 071 3510 www.uk.overture.com

Recent New Media Stories from NewsLine Sky Takes Sporting Events Online New Research Set To Revolutionise Online Ad Planning Ask Jeeves Extends Online Ad Portfolio

Subscribers can access ten years of NewsLine articles by clicking the Search button to the left