• by Masha Geller , July 28, 2003

Overture Services, Inc. and Knight Ridder Digital on Monday announced an agreement under which Overture will provide its full-service search products to Knight Ridder Digital for one year. Under the terms of the agreement, Overture will be the exclusive provider of both paid placement and Web search results.

In addition, Knight Ridder Digital will work with Overture to roll out programs using Content Match, Overture's contextual advertising product. Overture's top paid placement search results will appear on Knight Ridder Digital's websites. Additionally, Overture will leverage its algorithmic, or Web-wide, search capabilities, from its recent acquisition of the Web search unit of FAST to serve the Web-wide results on the remainder of the search page.

Knight Ridder Digital also named Overture as a provider of contextual advertising, a new and rapidly expanding market, which embeds relevant results on content-based pages. Overture's contextual advertising product, Content Match, features Overture's paid placement listings generated by the company's growing worldwide base of 95,000 advertisers.

The Knight Ridder win follows another sizable deal Overture signed last week, where it extended its commercial search distribution relationship with HP in the U.S. for one year, and expanded the agreement to include Canada. The agreement marked the first deal that extends beyond the expected fourth-quarter closing of Yahoo's acquisition of the search provider announced earlier this month.