Overture Services, Inc.
Overture Services, Inc. is an Idealab spin off, formerly known as Goto.com, that was the inventor of what is known in the search engine business as P4P, or Pay For Performance. This proved to be a fairly controversial notion, with a lot of concern raised about manipulation and the results being irrelevant. In reality, the auction model, combined with an extensive editorial team, tended to produce highly relevant results. By partnering with other search portals such as Yahoo! and MSN, Overture proved to have come up with the most effective way to monetize search. This model was later adopted by competitors, most famously Google under the trademark AdWords. In 2003, Overture was acquired by one of its biggest customers: Yahoo!.
Overture also runs AlltheWeb, a web search-engine which it acquired from Fast Search & Transfer in 2003.