Ask.com has migrated off of their mapping platform and onto Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform. Ask follows suit of many portal sites letting Microsoft make the heavy investments in infrastructure, imagery, photography acquisition, data updates, etc hence allowing them to focus on developing applications that benefit end users. Other portals incorporating Microsoft's Virtual Earth include YellowPages.com, Superpages.com, and WhitePages.com among many.
Ask.com's parent IAC is the latest to join the already crowded ad network space. The company announced that it is planning to build an in-house ad network.
The mini-network pools inventory from IAC's collection of sites. Ads can be targeted and sold across them to reach specific audience segments.
IAC hopes to differentiate itself from other content-cum-ad-networks by enabling advertisers to sell ads against user activities. For instance, a frequent Evite or Ticketmaster user may be served ads based on parties thrown or event tickets purchased.
One analyst claims that if the ad network proves popular, it could catapult IAC into a top-tier player in online ad sales.
Ask.com, plans to acquire Lexico, which owns Dictionary.com, as well as Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. Ask.com’s chief executive, Jim Safka, declined to disclose terms of the deal but it is estimated to be about $100 million said a person with knowledge of the transaction. He also said the company will drop its focus on women and focus on being a general purpose search engine.
Dictionary.com had about 15 million visitors in March and is growing rapidly. It sells ads on its site, and Mr. Safka said it is profitable, though he won’t discuss any actual numbers. Ask.com, which has an advertising deal with Google, will be able to make more money from the site, he said.
The deal is also an effort by Ask.com to increase the number of queries on its site. Ask.com and Dictionary.com will attempt to cycle traffic between each other, Mr. Safka said. If you search for “diabetes” on Dictionary.com, you’ll get a definition, but you’ll also be given the option to go further by searching, on Ask.com, for “diabetes treatment,” “types of diabetes,” “causes of diabetes” or “warning signs of diabetes,” for example. Similarly, if you search for a word on Ask.com, the search engine will be able to provide its definition along with traditional search results.
Mr. Safka say the two companies have a similar customer base. The second most searched term on Ask.com last year was “dictionary,” he said. “We’ll be able to dramatically grow our base of traffic,” Mr. Safka said. comScore puts Ask.com’s share of the search market, 4.7 percent in March.
Answers.com / Dictionary.com Purchase Last year, Answers.com tried to buy Lexico for about $100 million in cash, but the deal fell through after Google changed its search ranking algorithm and Answers.com's traffic dropped 28 percent. As a result Answers.com could not raise the money it need to complete the Lexico acquisition and hence the deal fell through.
How did the top four search engines perform in the first 4 weeks of the year? Data from Hitwise shows that Google accounted for 65.98% of all US searches. Yahoo followed with 20.94%, MSN Live Search at 6.9%, and Ask trailing at 4.21% which reflects an increase of 19% YOY.
"Search engines remain the primary way internet users navigate to key industry categories" according to Hitwise. Interesting growth trend is that travel, news and media, entertainment, business and finance, and sports all underwent significant increases in the share of traffic coming from search engines, from Jan'08 to Jan'07.
Ask.com is leveraging the core capability of what the mobile phone does best i.e. transit speech, to provide voice-activated directions. Ask.com Mobile announced that they've added a new option to their Directions service called Click to Speak. The feature lets Ask.com Mobile users verbally enter addresses by speaking instead of keying them in. Users can activate a voice activated directions service with a click and within seconds receive a text message with a link to directions.
Here's a how-to video but basically, from your mobile device, you navigate to www.ask.com or http://m.ask.com, click on "Directions", then click "Click to Speak the addresses - no typing" link, click the "Continue" link to start the service and follow the voice prompts to speak your start and desired end location. You will then receive a text message with a link to the directions.
Google is expected to start adding blogs in the next week or so to its universal search results, an initiative which was launched back in May. According to Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience, queries will return links to blogs alongside the images, news, books, local maps and video. This is indicative of the growing popularity and effectiveness of blogs which at last count were being created at 100,00 per day. The other big three search engines - Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask - currently include blogs as part of their search results in some form or the other.
In case anyone missed it, Ask.com also released their "Top Searches for 2007". Topping the list for the second year in a row was 'MySpace', followed by Dictionary, and ironically Google. Top presidential candidate searches were Barack Obama followed by Hillary Clinton. I am not a sports buff but for those of you who are, the top sports team searches were the Red Sox and Cowboys. Top TV show searches were Hannah Montana and Family Guy. And, this is a different one, the "Top Celebrity Search of Pregnant Stars" (not just of celebrities :)) was Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek. Although, I wonder if that includes queries for "JLo" as well.
Google and Yahoo also announced their Fastest Growing Search Terms and topping the list for Google was iPhone and Barack and Hillary were also in the running for both Yahoo and Google as well as Facebook but was a no show on Ask.com's top list. MySpace didn't show up in the top ten for Yahoo but did for Google and Ask.com.
comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR), released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace for September 2007. Google remained the top search property with more than 5.3 billion core searches conducted, representing a 57% share of the search market, followed by Yahoo! 23.7%, Microsoft 10.3%, Ask.com 4.7% and Time Warner Network 4.3 %.
comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location
Share of Searches (%)
Search Entity Aug-07 Sep-07 Sep vs. Aug Total Core Search 100.0% 100.0% 0.0 Google Sites 56.5% 57.0% 0.5 Yahoo! Sites 23.3% 23.7% 0.4 Microsoft Sites 11.3% 10.3% -1.0 Ask Network 4.5% 4.7% 0.2 Time Warner Network 4.5% 4.3% -0.2
* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
September U.S. Expanded Search Rankings
In the September 2007 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the pack with 6.6 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 2.4 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (999 million), Time Warner Network (843 million) and Fox Interactive Media (492 million). Despite the decline in overall search activity in September, Ask.com saw a 10-percent gain versus August.
Expanded Search Query Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Locations
Search Queries (MM)
Expanded Search Entity Aug-07 Sep-07 Sep vs. Aug Total Expanded Search 13,703 13,018 -5.0% Google Sites 6,809 6,593 -3.2% Google 5,602 5,388 -3.8% YouTube/All Other 1,207 1,205 -0.2% Yahoo! Sites 2,473 2,381 -3.7% Yahoo! 2,438 2,346 -3.8% All Other 35 35 0.0% Microsoft Sites 1,144 999 -12.7% MSN-Windows Live 1,111 966 -13.1% Microsoft/All Other 33 33 0.0% Time Warner Network 937 843 -10.0% AOL 438 397 -9.4% Mapquest/All Other 499 446 -10.6% Fox Interactive Media 571 492 -13.8% MySpace 560 483 -13.8% All Other 11 9 -18.2% eBay 457 445 -2.6% Ask Network 439 445 1.4% Ask.com 205 226 10.2% MyWebSearch.com/ All Other 234 219 -6.4% CRAIGSLIST.ORG 199 197 -1.0% Amazon Sites 154 138 -10.4% Comcast Corporation 73 65 -11.0%
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Ask.com's parent IAC is the latest to join the already crowded ad network space. The company 
Ask.com, plans to 
How did the top four search engines perform in the first 4 weeks of the year? Data from Hitwise shows that Google accounted for 65.98% of all US searches. Yahoo followed with 20.94%, MSN Live Search at 6.9%, and Ask trailing at 4.21% which reflects an increase of 19% YOY.
