Idealab launched GoTo.com and introduced the concept of paid search to the Internet. A controversial idea at the time of launch, GoTo completed hundreds of millions of paid introductions, each of which represented the successful match of a user need with an advertising offering. The company went public in 1999 and in 2001 became Overture Services. Two years later, the company was acquired by Yahoo! for $1.6 billion. Today this business model is the underpinning of the multi-billion dollar online search market.