• by Masha Geller , August 29, 2002

One piece of news that I expect was largely ignored by the ad world last week (as everyone was enjoying the last few days of summer away from their desks), was the extension of the search distribution agreement between Overture and InfoSpace. The companies will stay together until March 2006. Their current agreement would have expired in February 2004.

Under the extended agreement, Overture will continue to be the premier provider of paid search listings to InfoSpace's Web search properties, including Excite, Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler, as well as other InfoSpace search distribution relationships. As the premier provider, Overture is guaranteed premium placement across InfoSpace's Web search properties.

That’s good news for Overture - the leader of the paid search field - considering they’ve lost some ground to Google in recent months.

InfoSpace's meta-search technology is designed to identify the intent of a user's search through a sophisticated query routing technology, which sorts the results for a search query accordingly and then displays a blended mix of highly relevant commercial and non-commercial results.

Overture's search results are generated by its 67,000 advertisers who bid for placement on keywords that are relevant to their businesses. Search listings are screened by Overture's 100-person editorial team before being distributed to the company's industry-leading affiliate partner network, which includes many of the Internet's popular destination sites, such as InfoSpace's Web search properties.

Why is this important? As our Online Spin columnist Cory Treffiletti said last week, “In 1996 the most effective form of online advertising was ‘keywords.’ In 2002 the most effective form of online advertising is ‘search results.’”