Yahoo Completes Overture Name Change

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Apr 18, 2005

2 minute read

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Yahoo completed a name change Monday for its Overture Services search-based advertising division.

As promised last month, Yahoo Inc. brought its advertising division under its corporate branding umbrella.

The Overture name has changed to Yahoo Search Marketing for the U.S. market, Yahoo announced.

Yahoo extended the branding change across a range of its search marketing products and services.

It renamed the flagship Precision Match search advertising program to Sponsored Search, and it started calling its group of distribution partners running contextual sponsored listings the Yahoo Publisher Network.

Yahoo, of Sunnyvale, Calif., entered the sponsored listings market in 2003 when it acquired Overture Services Inc. for $1.6 billion.

As part of the name rollout, Yahoo introduced a new advertiser program in the travel space. Called Travel Submit, it lets advertisers send travel offers and deals to Yahoo Travel.

/zimages/4/28571.gifRead morehereabout search engines tackling online travel.

Along with the branding shift, Yahoo also launched a new Web site for advertisers, which provides search marketing information and tools.

Yahoo plans to expand the renaming of Overture to international markets, except for in Japan and Korea, where the Overture brand will remain.

The creation of the Yahoo Search Marketing group comes amid speculation that Yahoo plans to expand its sponsored listings program for publisher sites to a wider audience.

Yahoo officials have said that they are working on new publisher programs, and industry observers widely expect that Yahoo will offer a self-service program for publishers to compete with Google Inc.s AdSense program.

In other search news, Infospace Inc. announced Monday that it had signed a two-year agreement with Microsoft Corp.s MSN division to provide results from MSN Search as part of Infospaces meta-search offerings.

Infospaces search and directory division expects to integrate MSN Search into its meta-search properties this summer. Those sites include Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler.

Infospace, of Bellevue, Wash., also provides its meta-search services to third parties, such as media sites and Internet access providers.

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