ITV and Yahoo! join together for online search service

by Julia Pearlman, Brand Republic 01-Aug-05, 08:00

LONDON - Yahoo! UK & Ireland has signed an agreement with ITV to provide search technology, sponsored search and contextual advertising on ITV.com from its Overture subsidiary.

Visitors to ITV's sites, including itv.com/soaps, itv.com/motor and itv.com/football, will now be able to use a Yahoo! seach box at the top of each page to search within the ITV website or extend to across the web, including image, video and news content.

The website will also display Overture's sponsored search listings on the search results pages and through the ITV.com site as contextual advertising.

Yahoo! Search recently won two awards from Search Engine Watch for outstanding search service and best image search.

Rob Jonas, head of business development at Yahoo! Search, UK & Ireland, said: "This agreement demonstrates the growing strength of out search technology, as well as our commitment to work with partners to deliver compelling search user experiences.

"This should be the first of what we hope will be many agreements with popular online properties."

The integrated approach will be set up with the look and feel of each ITV section and searches will be tailored to its user profile and habits to ensure relevancy.

Yahoo! will also include all of ITV.com's online content through its content acquisition programme to ensure that Yahoo! UK & Ireland users will benefit by being able to find information about their favourite television programmes.

Yahoo has just announced that its profits are up to $755m (£430m), however shares slid 10% as analysts voiced disappointment with second-quarter results.

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