Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forFebruary 20th, 2003 | back to home

20 February 2003

What a depressing turn of events – what used to be the best search engine before Google has been bought by Overture. It is a rather distasteful (but apparently successful) company which provides paid-for search results to other search engines (who in turn don’t always make it clear that the links are advertisements). They say they want to use the AltaVista web site to “test and refine new products in a live setting” – which I interpret as wanting to use a respected brand to fool people into following paid-for links.

P.S. if you follow the link to the news above you will see a rather different look to the BBC page – that’s because BBC News has redesigned.

Like most successful redesigns I think this one has done its job well without being too intrusive. But I do wish they would bring back the summaries of stories on the home page and on each section page.flip fix loans and 100student tax loan 2006 deduction federalloan 502 leveragedloans $200 paydayrules annuity 403b loanprogram loan afsafter auto loan repossessionstudent payments loans acsloan home abusive actadam neal va loan