GoTo and Overture

GoTo main page in 1998

GoTo (not to be confused with Go.com or Go2Net) was an Idealab spin off and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service.^[1][2][3] It started off with the purchase of World Wide Web Worm (WWWW), one of the oldest search engines.^[4] GoTo is considered to have been an influential pioneer of paid search.^[5][6]

In February 1998, GoTo offered advertisers the option of bidding on how much they would be willing to pay to appear at the top of results in response to specific searches. The bid amount was paid by the advertiser to GoTo every time a searcher clicked on a link to the advertiser's website. By July 1998, advertisers were paying anything up to a dollar per click. In June 1999, GoTo launched a tool set direct traffic centre (dtc) to enable advertisers access to keywords and real time bidding.

GoTo's business model was based on the idea that its paid listings would make it more relevant than other services, especially for general searches, and web sites that pay more are probably better sites. A similar service had been offered by Open Text in 1996, but this precipitated outcries and bad publicity because searchers at the time did not want the search process more commercialized.

In contrast, GoTo's pay-for-placement model was very successful. Commentors theorized that the Internet had matured in the intervening two years, and this type of economic models were more acceptable since the web was no longer just a place for academic research, but also a place for buying products. GoTo founder Bill Gross speculated at the launch that GoTo would succeed because, as a relatively new service, it had no reputation to taint with paid listings, unlike Open Text.

On October 8, 2001, GoTo renamed itself Overture Services, Inc.^[7] GoTo's chief operating officer Jaynie Studenmund, mother of fallen U.S. soldier Scott Studenmund,^[8] said, "We also felt it was a sophisticated enough name, in case our products expand."

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^[9]

This success enabled Overture to acquire web sites such as AltaVista and AlltheWeb.^[10]

Acquisition of Overture by Yahoo!

On October 7, 2003, Overture was acquired by its biggest customer, Yahoo!, for $1.63 billion.^[11][10] The old brand name of Overture was phased out as Yahoo rebranded many of its products under the Yahoo name. The exception to this was in Japan and Korea where the local businesses continued to use the Overture brand.

Panama

Panama was an online advertising platform created by Yahoo!, launched on 5 February 2007.^[12] Panama was Yahoo's effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing business then dominated by Google, which is now also dominated by Google. Customers with accounts already on Yahoo! were transferred to the new system over the following few months. Yahoo! inherited the search advertising business when it purchased Overture (previously named Goto.com). Until Panama, Yahoo! search continued to operate the original simplistic algorithm which ranked text ads according to how much advertisers bid for the keyword searched by the user. Meanwhile, Google operates under a more sophisticated model, which ranks paid ads on the basis of bid price as well as prior click-through rates. This improvement generally produces higher click through rates (hence higher revenues) for the search engine.

For example, an ambulance-chasing attorney bidding for the keywords "back pain" would likely get a lower clickthrough rate than the keyword "physiotherapist", regardless of what the two parties bid per click. An algorithm that eventually de-prioritises the attorney's ad is better for the search engine (in terms of revenue produced) and the user (more relevant ads).

Key players in the Panama project were Brian Acton, David Henke & Qi Lu.

Yahoo Gemini

Logo (2009-2013)

Logo (2013-2014 Gemini launch)

During the tenure of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo's CEO she started a new advertising platform project under the name Gemini. The goal was to build a native advertising solution, where the ads take on the format of the content they accompany.^[14]

The so-called "quality index" gave advertisers a sense of how the system would rank an ad along with sophisticated analytical tools that gave advertisers insights on why certain campaigns had been effective.