How to Become a Yahoo Search Marketing Advertiser

Yahoo! Search Marketing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture Services, Inc.), was an Idealab spin off, originally known as Goto.com, that was the inventor of what is known in the search engine business as P4P, or Pay For Performance. This proved to be a fairly controversial notion, with a lot of concern raised about manipulation and the results being irrelevant.[citation needed] In actuality, the auction model, combined with an extensive editorial team, produced highly relevant search results. Through partnerships, Overture enabled portals such as MSN and Yahoo! to monetize the hundreds of millions of web searches made each day on their sites. Indeed, these partnerships proved highly lucrative, and in a period otherwise marked by dot-com failures, Overture became a substantial profit driver for portals like Yahoo!. (estimating that Overture contributed $25 million to Yahoo!'s revenue in Q3 2002). The business model and its crucial attendant patents were later copied by several competitors, including, most famously, Google under the trademark AdWords.

In 2003, Overture was acquired by its biggest customer: Yahoo! for $1.7 billion. Before being integrated into Yahoo!, it had acquired, integrated, and run AltaVista and AlltheWeb, web search-engines which it acquired from CMGI and Fast Search & Transfer in 2003. The old brand names of Overture and others, such as the trademark Site Match are being phased out, as Yahoo! re-brands all of its products under the Yahoo! name.

Goto.com is now owned and redirected to go2.com, an online and mobile search company.