WSJ.com starts showing paid ads from Overture

The online edition of the Wall Street Journal has now started to show paid contextual ads from Overture at the bottom of some articles. Google and Overture have been competing to sign up new online properties to show contextual ads.

CBS MarketWatch has a couple articles about AOL's attitude toward search.

Would AOL drop Google?

AOL: 'Search is just a feature'

These articles make it seem that AOL is losing users becuase doing Google searches leads them to websites that aren't owned by Time Warner (AOL's parent company). They would do better to own an algorithmic search engine and keep them on AOL properties. I think that this argument is flawed. Even if AOL has its own search engine, unless it gives the best search results, people will go elsewhere. Regardless of who owns the search engine, it must give good results, and that may be non-AOL sites.

Yahoo! finally replaces Google as the search engine powering Yahoo! Search with Inktomi

Yahoo! announced this morning that Google will no longer be the underlying algorithmic search engine powering search on the Yahoo! site. Yahoo! Search will now be powered by Inktomi which it bought in 2002. This makes a lot of sense for Yahoo! as Google is a major competitor for Yahoo!.

Related links:

Yahoo! Introduces More Comprehensive And Relevant Search Experience with New Yahoo! Search Technology

Yahoo dumps Google search technology

Yahoo! Search

An article about Search from the March 2004 issue of MIT Technology Review called Search Beyond Google. This article mentions some interesting competitors to Google:

Nutch - an open-source search engine

Mooter.com - an Australian based search engine

Dipsie.com - a company that launched in Summer 2003 and plans on releasing their search engine in 2004.