Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

PASADENA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 21, 2003--Overture Services, Inc. (Nasdaq:OVER), a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet, today announced the launch of the world's largest search index of approximately 3.2 billion documents. The index was developed by the former Web search unit of Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), which Overture acquired in April.

The expanded index of unique Web documents demonstrates Overture's commitment to leadership in Web search development by continuing to deliver new levels of comprehensiveness, relevancy, and freshness for its index. In addition to increasing the size of the index by over 1 billion documents, the launch features several significant relevance enhancements that will improve the ranking of URLs. These features include a new method of determining how authoritative a page or site is on a specific topic as well as overall page quality.

The release of the expanded index follows Overture's announcement earlier this summer that AltaVista (www.altavista.com) provides consumers with the largest multimedia index available on the Web today. The AltaVista multimedia index includes approximately 550 million files, with 125 million more audio/video files than the next highest competitor. Overture acquired the business of AltaVista in April.

"Our release of the world's largest Web index, coupled with the largest multimedia index, demonstrates the scalability of our search architecture," said Jim Barnett, president, Overture Web Search. "We will continue to lead and innovate by seeking to deliver the best search products and services to our distribution partners, advertisers and users around the world."

"Increasing the index size while also working to improve relevance offers consumers and Overture's syndicated partners the best of both worlds," said Greg Notess, a respected search engine expert and editor of SearchEngineShowdown.com. "The enlarged index helps users find even more of what is available on the Web and demonstrates Overture's commitment to continuing to improve their Web search products."

About Overture

Overture is a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet, providing new and more powerful ways for businesses and customers to connect online. Overture pioneered commercial search by aligning the interests of consumers, its 95,000 active, paying advertisers and its distribution partners, including Yahoo!, MSN and CNN. The company offers a full suite of Internet search products and search-related services. In addition, the company operates the AltaVista.com and AlltheWeb.com Web sites. Founded in 1997, Overture is based in Pasadena, Calif., with U.S. offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Palo Alto, Calif. The headquarters for Overture's non-U.S. business is in Ireland, with offices in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Japan, South Korea and Australia. On July 14, 2003, Yahoo! and Overture signed a definitive agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Overture subject to certain conditions. For more information about Overture, visit www.overture.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements include without limitation statements that users will want to use the new FAST index. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, among others, that the implementation of the new features and services described herein may not be successful or may not generate revenue or other economic benefit for Overture, that others may launch indexes containing more documents or offer superior search products or services. For a discussion of other risks that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from such forward-looking statements, see Overture's discussion of "Risks That Could Affect Our Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Overture's quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the period ended June 30, 2003. Overture undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this press release.

    CONTACT: Overture Services, Inc.
             Jennifer Stephens,  (Media)
             Laurie Berman,  (Investors)