The Story of Search: How Google beat Overture and Yahoo by backing the long tail

WARC Online U.S. editor Geoffrey Precourt reports on a presentation given by Gary Flake, Microsoft technical fellow and director of Microsoft Live Labs, at the Advertising Research Foundation's 2009 annual Re:think conference.

The Story of Search: How Google beat Overture and Yahoo by backing the long tail

Geoffrey PrecourtWARC Online

Gary Flake, Microsoft technical fellow and director of Microsoft Live Labs, first became renowned for failure.

In 2003, he joined Overture as chief science officer. At the time, as he reminded an audience at the 2009 Advertising Research Foundation's 2009 Annual "Re:think" conference, the search-engine business largely was a duopoly. In fact, a year later, Overture had a 55-percent market share, Google 35 percent, and a variety of other providers shared the remaining 10-percent.

Five years on, Flake said, "the pie...

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