Search Engine Journal

Overture Changing Its Name to Yahoo

Besides the Yahoo API announcement this morning, the amazing public relations team over at the Overture booth today filled me in on the death of the Overture brand name and its rebranding of a Yahoo service. The main reason for this rebranding seems to be customer recognition.

As search engine marketing becomes to get more and more popular among the more traditional marketing crowd the name ‘Overture’ is not as well recognized as ‘Yahoo’. It’s really about time that Yahoo drop the Overture name and bring it all in under one large Yahoo branded umbrella.

The concept is really quite simple, Google AdWords is Google. Yahoo Mail is Yahoo. GMail is Google. There is no reason to keep Overture branded as a separate entity. Yahoo did the same rebranding after its acquisition of Inktomi and the transformation of the old Inktomi technology into Yahoo Search. Google has done similar rebranding with their acquistions, skillfully transforming Picassa into Google Picassa.

What does this mean for Yahoo? There seems to be a lot of plans in the making as Yahoo may be gearing up to go after some of the Google advertising market share. Additionally, for Search Engine Marketers, we can finally just tell our clients that we’re spending a certain percentage of their marketing budget on Yahoo/MSN paid search, while not having to answer the ongoing question; “What is Overture?”