ASK Buys Dictionary.com - Drops Focus On Women

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.