Microsoft Pulling a Fast One?
Saturday, February 9th, 2008Did you know that there is a search engine out there that is superior to Google? And that Microsoft will shortly purchase it? Obviously, all of this is important in the context of the take-over bid for Yahoo! that Microsoft announced just over week ago, a move that was widely interpreted as being a challenge to Google. Peter Buhr, writing in Die Zeit (Pincer-Attack on Google), sheds some light on what could be one important aspect of the proposed deal that I haven’t seen any coverage of in any English-language forum.
You can actually try out this other search engine for yourself to see what you think: it’s at AlltheWeb, and happens to be owned by Yahoo!, having first been sold to Overture in 2003 whereupon Overture itself was sold to Yahoo! in 2004. According to Buhr, the main problem that has held AlltheWeb back from greater public acceptance has simply been marketing – people never knew about it because PR has never been a specialty of the engineers there. (more…)
