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Freeserve search shows Overture results.

24th of February 2002

Freeserve an important UK ISP, now appears to be serving search users results from Overture, a pay for placement service. The Overture solution will penalise people using Freeserve's own free or better described "bundled" web hosting who are not paying for adverts on Overture. Further, this increases the relevance of Overture.co.uk to UK consumer marketers who .. read on >>

UK B2C marketers now should take Overture pay for placement more seriously as many Freeserve home users will log into Freeserve's homepage each time they connect to the Internet.

Freeserve which was promoted through UK retail organisations Dixons, PC World and Currys before becoming part of Wandoo must serve a primarily home based set of users which means consumer products and services are of particular interest.

In August 2001 there were 10 Million UK homes with Internet connections up from 6 million in 2000 (click here to read article). Of the providers concerned Freeserve has a considerable market share with dial up and any time packages while other connection suppliers include: BT, Cable & wireless with NTL, Tesco, Virgin, Onenet, AOL.

As with many other dial up packages, installing from the Freeserve CD inserts their default homepage into the users browser causing users to load Freeserve's homepage each time they connect to the world wide web.

While experienced Internet users know how to set their own default homepage or load a blank page, it will usually take some months before new users realise they do not have to enter at one page but can override this function.

In this time the Freeserve homepage and search function will get plenty of use and Overture branded search results will attain a respectable level of credibility in the eyes of UK consumers.

Author Mark Abraham (mark@sticky-marketing.net) 23 February 2002

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Credit: That freeserve was being served Overture results was brought to my attention by a post in the forums of Webmasterworld.com a site containing copious information for independent webmasters interested in search engines to keep up to date with events.