In February 1998 GoTo.com, a project of Idealab, started using favored placement. The search engine ranked web sites depending on how much they are willing to pay to be listed at the top for a search term under a real-time competitive bidding process.[1] Unlike Open Text, GoTo.com was more successful that after five months, more than a thousand sites were paying for favored placement.[2] Yahoo! acquired GoTo.com (which was renamed Overture Services, Inc. at the time) and the service became Yahoo!