The sponsored Web search engine Overture, which Yahoo has signed an agreement to acquire for approximately $1.6 billion, has chosen the Israeli startup Quigo to provide the technology to compete against the rival Google, the king of Internet search.
Earlier this year, Google introduced a new service, provided by Adsense technology. When a surfer reads a particular site, he is automatically shown a list of related links by the side.
The list includes e-commerce sites which sell products relevant to the site being read.
Yahoo had bought Overture, which developed the technology of sponsored online search under the name Context Match, specifically to target Google.
The new technology has every chance of succeeding with sponsored online content search growing in the U.S. and reaching $927 million in 2002, a leap of 325% on the previous year, according to trade statistics.
The market is expected to reach $7 billion in the U.S. in five years. As a result of the contract with Overture, some of Quigo's staff are expected to relocate to the U.S. Quigo was set up in 2000 by American investor Jack Lahav, Magic Solutions founder Yigal Lichtman, and Professor Dan Gallay of Hebrew University School of Business Administration, whose son Yaron is Quigo's operations VP.
The company has patented technology for sponsored searches but suffered a blow, along with everyone else, when the dot-com bubble burst.
"Only in the past year have we started to see revenue," says Yaron Gallay. "There were years when we worked for no pay. We didn't lay off staff, but we didn't pay them either. But we persevered and grew slowly."
