My gosh...up until now I thought Overture was planning to be on its own to dominate the search sphere after acquiring AltaVista and Fast...but it looks like it was just some behind the scene ploy.

I saw this in NY Times today

Yahoo to Buy Overture in $1.6 Billion Deal (Free Registration Required)

Why does this matter? For the most part as an end-user knowing that I have choices in the selection of using a variety of search engines is great, but when your choice narrows down to only a handful, I don't feel like I'm getting true access to richness of the Internet. Overture already has FAST & Altavista, Yahoo just purchased Inktomi...so who are the players now? And it seems that only a few years ago many were huffing and puffing about Microsoft taking over the browser war and all things monopoly-like.