It is now official. The search engine Inktomi is part of the Overture group. For a few months, since MSN dropped the results from LookSmart’s directory, Inktomi advertisers had enjoyed privileged rankings. Not any more. From the 1st of March, Inktomi is replaced with Overture Site Match. This move enables Yahoo!, the current owners of Overture, to compete head-to-head with Google, the largest and, by far, the most popular search engine in the internet, whilst deriving a very healthy revenue from advertising fees.
What it means for Inktomi advertisers
Site owners that submitted to Inktomi in the past will no longer be able to do so using Inktomi’s previous partners (e.g. Trellian Software). Instead, they need to create an account with Overture Site Match, the company’s new product. This product is not advertised in the UK area of their site.
In addition to the on-going annual fee of $49 for submitting one page to the engine, $29 for subsequent pages, Overture has added a cost-per-click charge of $0.15 and $0.30 for selected categories. The cost-per-click may sound small but, if your chosen category is popular and your site ranks well, the cost of advertising with Overture can easily escalate.
The initial cost for submitting three pages to Overture Site Match, all listed under the same category, is $157. Categories are quite general and your pages will be reviewed by Overture’s editorial team to make sure they fit in with the category you select. We don’t know whether the review process is carried out every time the contents of the page are changed. The account includes a deposit of $50 to cover immediate traffic costs. When the $50 deposit runs out, Overture will ask you to top up your balance or your pages will be dropped from the results.
What it means for Overture Pay-for-performance advertisers
The current Pay-for-Performance listings are not affected in any way. Site Match is a different product and requires a separate account.
Our thoughts on this subject
We don’t know yet whether Site Match will supply its results using Inktomi’s techniques. Inktomi was a useful engine for publishers of time-sensitive information. The 48-hour turnaround for their engine spider was a plus for this engine and, since MSN stopped publishing results from LookSmart, the rankings were much more prominent.
At this stage we are only certain that opening an account with Site Match for $157 will buy you 165 clicks, at a cost of $0.95 per click. Our advice is: if you are going to pay for the clicks to your site, consider Pay-for-performance or Google AdWords.