Yahoo! Dumps Espotting

Yahoo! is using the recently-acquired Overture to provide paid search listings on its European Web properties, replacing Espotting Media.

Depending on the country, Overture will provide up to four paid links at the top and up to three links at the bottom of each page of search results.

The move comes three weeks after Yahoo! completed its $1.6 billion acquisition of Overture, formerly GoTo.com, which pioneered pay-for-placement search. Today, Overture began providing paid search results on Yahoo! in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Ireland. It also has distribution deals with European portals and ISPs including MSN, AOL Europe, Wanadoo, Lycos, AltaVista, and Tiscali.

Espotting, based in London, is in the process of being acquired by FindWhat.com for 8.1 million shares and $27 million in cash. That merger is in now in question, however, because of questions about its financial results.

Espotting said that, in anticipation of Yahoo!’s move, it had added new distribution partners. It says that in September 2003 it handled 1 billion queries, excluding the Yahoo! traffic