The Rumor that Won't Die
Today Overture Services is trading up 17% on rumors that Yahoo will buy the company. This time around, the rumor is mentioning specific ratios: one-half share of Yahoo plus $11, or $25/share, quite a premium over the current Overture stock price of $14.50.
A deal like this would really make me shake my head, given what has transpired lately: Yahoo acquired Inktomi and Overture acquired FAST and AltaVista. It's like all the king's horses and all the king's men will be needed to thwart Google's lead in web search. But three also-ran search engines put together don't necessarily add up to much of a threat.
The only reason I have to assume there is a grain of truth to this is that a massive selloff would have happened already since this is an actively-traded stock in a downtrend. Surely some big holders would take this "pop" as an opportunity to dump if the rumor were false. Stay tuned. If it does come to pass, it could be one of Yahoo's silliest acquisitions yet. It's doubtful that MSN, Lycos, and other big partners would maintain their Overture deals if it were a part of Yahoo. Overture does have 90,000 advertisers, and Yahoo would enjoy a 100% revenue share of pay-per-click ads if it acquired Overture, but as I've argued earlier, those 90,000 would no doubt sign up with Yahoo in a heartbeat if they went in-house (or acquired another PPC player at a much lower price).
Posted by Andrew
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
Google Hacks Makes a Splash
What's an API? Well, apparently, a bunch of people care enough about Google nowadays to want to find out. Google Hacks, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, has vaulted its way onto the New York Time Business Paperback Bestseller list.
Posted by Andrew
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Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Two-and-a-Half Point Online News Manifesto
1. Yahoo, please seriously partner with (or seriously consider acquiring) Moreover Technologies. Like a lot of you out there, I frequently check a customized "My Yahoo!" page. On this page there are some useful elements, such as the real-time currency conversion table that is showing the Canadian dollar climbing relentlessly. But the news portion which dominates the page (the way I have it set up, anyway) is becoming increasingly useless. It seems that the online feeds provided by the majority of sources - Reuters, AP, The New York Times, Golfserv, you name it - are neither frequently updated nor comprehensive in their coverage. Some of them even get stuck for weeks, so you waste your time looking at the same headline every day until it unsticks. But even more vexing perhaps is the outdated concept behind all of this. News junkies want better customization that really works. Moreover's promise is that it's a "web-savvy" version of old-style news services. It has been widely adopted on niche websites all over the place to serve up highly topical news. It's a "Reuters for the 21st century," if you will. So much so that a concerned Reuters actually made a significant investment in Moreover.
2. Unfortunately for Moreover lovers, though, Moreover is starting to suck. What used to be a nicely-customizable, categorizable, XML-feedable combination of major news sources and quality articles from relevant niche trade mags and high quality web sites has become a watered-down mishmash, often peppered with drivel which is, in some cases, created by webmasters who have decided to pump out numerous little one-paragraph stories on a daily basis. In other words, we see sites starting to "optimize for Moreover." But where is the quality control? If I wanted to search random observations on weblogs, I'd use some other means of searching. And why are some sites' "blurbs" somehow picked up and distributed as "articles" and others, not? There seems to be little rhyme or reason to any of this. Cleanup on Aisle 7, Moreover. Trying to market your technology as a unique type of KM tool for the enterprise, because it offers "competitive intelligence" of various remarks made online, makes plenty of sense. But the attempt to sell corporates on your jauntily-positioned product shouldn't interfere with the usefulness of your public news feeds. How about some guidelines, as follows? Stories that are not from original sources don't get credited to guys who have plagiarized the first paragraph of news from a major news source. Weblog entries don't get indexed as news. And "articles" of fewer than four paragraphs or 200 words don't get indexed.
3. If the above two conditions are not met, need we remind you that Google Search and Google News are poised to take away your market? People are already using Google News because it just flat-out works. It's amazing to me that major companies like Yahoo and pioneers like Moreover are going to stand by and hand Google another info-retrieval monopoly.
Posted by Andrew
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