[NetRodent]

Its a further sign of the consolidation of the search engines. Yahoo bought Inktomi earlier in the year and now they have Overture, which recently bought Fast and Altavista. With the exception of Google, Yahoo now owns all the major crawler based search engines. They're sitting on a lot of search technology and patents.

So far Yahoo hasn't announced exactly what they're going to do with all of their new acquisitions, but it seems likely that they will ditch Google in favor of one of (or a blend) of Inktomi, Fast, or Altavista and integrate Overture's bidded listings more closely with their results. Hopefully they will fully syndicate Overture's adult listings to all the sites in their network, but I have my doubts.

Also Yahoo is now the sole supplier of results to MSN (Overture/Inktomi) and Lycos(Overture/Fast). I can't see MSN continuing to support their competitors for long so I suspect this will lead to some major reorganizations in the search engine world. I'm guessing that by next year, we'll see the big four portals powered something like the following:

Yahoo:
Merit listings via Inktomi (maybe Fast or Altavista)
Paid listings via Overture
Directory listings via Yahoo

MSN.com
Merit listings via an in house crawler they buy or develop
Bidded listings via Findwhat.com
No directory

Google.com
Merit listings via Google's crawler
Bidded listings via Google's Adwords
Directory via dmoz

AOL:
Merit listings via Google's crawler
Bidded listings via Google's Adwords
No directory

This reorganization should turn the major portals back into actual search engines as each of the portals (except AOL) will have their own merit and bidded indexes. What will this all mean for Overture? They'll almost certain lose MSN, but it could be more than made up for by greater inclusion at Yahoo.