You've probably heard that in the last two weeks Overture has bought both Alta Vista and FAST's AllTheWeb. Overture leads the search category that it calls "pay-for-performance", but which should be called "pay-for-rank", "money-before-relevance", or "lucrative distortion". Until now, Alta Vista and AllTheWeb were two of the best uncorrupted search engines, but definitely under the shadow of Google. In today's Information Today, Barbara Quint makes clear what many of us feared, and what earlier reports couldn't confirm, namely, that Overture will not only merge Alta Vista and AllTheWeb but convert them to the pay-for-rank model. This will make them as good as useless for research, and reduce the competition among objective search engines. Fortunately, Google is financially secure and publicly committed to resist the pay-for-rank model. Of course, serious scholarly search tends to use specialized search engines, such as those customized for OAI-compliant archives. But Google and its former competitors were the best hope for the billions of pages not within the scope of the specialized search engines. More coverage. [FOS News]