Overture Services, Inc. has extended its commercial search distribution relationship with HP in the U.S. for one year, and expanded the agreement to include Canada. This marks the first deal that extends beyond the expected fourth-quarter closing of Yahoo's acquisition of the search provider announced earlier this week. Under the terms of the agreement, Overture will provide its paid placement search results to users of the HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario lines of notebook and desktop PCs. Overture said it expects its commercial search results to be available to HP's Canadian users this summer. The Overture results will be available to users of HP computers performing Internet searches through HP's default home page and for those that click the "search" button of their Web browser.Yahoo! on Monday announced plans to acquire Overture for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $1.63 billion, marking the first purchase of a major search services provider by a major portal. Overture will become a wholly-owned unit of Yahoo, and its operations will remain in Pasadena, California, following completion of the acquisition. According to documents filed with securities regulators on Thursday, Overture would owe Yahoo! $65 million if Yahoo's acquisition of Overture is broken up by another offer.
Public pressure to curb mass spamming with unsolicited emails (which often try to sell pornography, loans, prescription drugs, investments and real estate) continues to mount. In a new Harris Poll of adults who are online, fully 79% now favor making mass-spamming illegal and only 10% oppose doing so. Given the amount of spam this should come as no surprise. On average people online estimate that they receive more than 40 emails a day, including those at home, work or at other locations, and that 40% of these emails are spam. These are the results of two Harris Polls, one conducted online between May 19 and 27, 2003 with a nationwide cross section of 3,462 adults who are online, and the other with a nationwide sample of 655 online adults surveyed by telephone between June 10 and 15, 2003. The types of email that annoy the most people a lot are pornography (86%), mortgages and loans (71%), prescription drugs such as Viagra (60%), and investments (59%). Many, but fewer people, are annoyed a lot by spam selling real estate (51%), software (36%) and computer and other hardware (31%). Some of these questions were asked in a previous Harris Poll and the trends are, in one sense, a bit of a paradox. Those who favor making spamming illegal have increased (from 74% last December to 79% now). But those who find spamming very annoying have declined from 80% last year to 64% now, and somewhat fewer people (but still substantial majorities) are annoyed a lot by the main types of spam. This suggests that while people may have become more efficient at identifying and deleting spam, this has not in any way reduced their desire to eliminate or reduce it. Two technical points are worth noting. Some experts have argued that making spamming illegal would not work, and the spammers would move offshore where they could not be prosecuted. The second point relates to the capacity of the Internet system. This survey suggests that if spam could be greatly reduced below its current level (40% of all emails in this research), this would free up a huge amount of space for other more desirable Internet traffic.