As we heard last year, Ask surrendered its search operations to its competitors and refocused on building out its Q&A platform. This seems to have paid off somewhat—the company has seen over 1 million downloads of its iPhone app. Mobile, specifically, has been a growth area for the Q&A platform, with a 100 percent increase in visits to Ask.com from smart phones over the last year (mobile is 10 percent of total usage). Today, Ask.com is bringing its Q&A platform to Android devices.

Ask says that the Android app is now available in the Android Marketplace and Amazon AppStore for Android. Includes all of the functionality of its iPhone application including voice to text features, the ability to get web results as well as top-voted published answers from other Ask.com users. You can also specifically send a question to a real user, and activate push notifications to alert you to when a new answer has arrived.

One of the Android-specific features is the ability to filter Q&A by topics that match your profile. You can also follow users who provide interesting answers, and personalize your Q&A experience with content from these connections.

Ask says that iPhones currently make up about 55 percent of Ask.com smartphone mobile traffic while Android makes up about 40 percent. Android traffic to Ask.com has skyrocketed 60 percent so far this year, so an Android app makes sense.

When you think of Ask.com, you definitely don’t think of a location-based app. But that’s exactly what the service has built, completely unrelated to their flagship search engine. And it’s actually a pretty cool, simple idea.

Ask Around is an iPhone app that uses your location to put you into a room with others using the app around you to have simple conversations. If this sounds like the just-launched Yobonogo, it is a bit like it. But it has a few key elements that are different. And more importantly, the genesis of the app was totally different.

Ask Around comes as a result of the ways people were using their flagship app. That app, which has 500,000 downloads, crowd-sources answers to questions that aren’t currently handled by the service’s main website. And engagement was so great to the point where people were starting to have conversations within the app. But rather than build out that functionality on the main app, which is still meant to be about asking questions and finding answers, Ask.com President Doug Leeds decided it would be fun to design a product from the ground up with location-based chat functionality.

“It was a very organic thing,” Leeds says, noting that it’s exciting to be able to get back to building new products at Ask. He feels as if the company was spending too much time on marketing in recent years. “That’s not in the DNA of the company, product is,” he says.

The way Ask Around works is simple. You open the app and you’re immediately put into a chat room with others around you. The key is that you can set the radius for that location. So it can be just a few hundred yards (those like in the same building as you) or it can be up to 15 miles (those in the same city as you). And that location can be adjusted on the fly to tailor the conversation.

But the even cooler aspect may be the ability to drop yourself anywhere in the world and hear conversations happening there. For example, if you dropped a pin around where TED is currently happening, you could follow along with the conversations people are having at that conference (well, if the app were live already). And you can save these locations to jump to later. And you can share these saved spots with other users.

One note: if you go to a different location, you can’t actually chat there, just listen in. This is for obvious spam and relevance reasons.

All of these conversations will also be streamed on the web. So an owner of a bar, for example, could put up a monitor to display conversations happening in realtime from that location.

While the app isn’t live in the App Store just yet (it will be just before SXSW), you can go here for more information. And watch the video for more.

Update: And in a surprise move, the app was actually approved a bit early. So you can find it in the App Store right now, here.

Here are a couple examples of people already chatting.

The saga continues. After informing us in September that the IAC-owned Bloglines was to be shut down permanently, Ask.com (the IAC property that operates Bloglines) has resurrected the troubled RSS feeder, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. IAC has transferred ownership of the property to an unlikely new patron: MerchantCircle, an online marketing network for small business owners. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but we do know that the deal was sort of in the family—IAC invested in MerchantCircle back in 2007. We are told Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service until December 1 of this year, after which the service will be transitioned to MerchantCircle.

IAC and Ask.com put Bloglines out of its misery after a tumultuous history. Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in trouble, facing competition from Google Reader and a shift away RSS to realtime news streams.

While we heard IAC was looking for ways to either refurbish, or sell Bloglines, it looks like they finally got around to the latter. But MerchantCircle is a surprising candidate considering that it is not a media property.

MerchantCircle, which has been quietly snapping up companies, provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists 1.4 million small businesses. The startup has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200. And the company could be eyeing an IPO in the coming year.

Ben Smith, co-founder of MerchantCircle, says he has big plans for Bloglines. The technology will be integrated into MerchantCircle to allow business owners to create RSS feeds on local news around their town, or city as well as their specific trade (i.e. feeds around plumbing, law, or construction). Smith says the platform will also be able to bring in feeds of local daily deals and coupons.

For all you loyal Bloglines users (the site has 2.7 million users), don’t fret. MerchantCircle will be keeping the former standalone service in place for non-MerchantCircle users, at the RSS platform’s present URL and Smith assures the the transition will be seamless for previous users (i.e. same log-ins and UI). One notable feature that will be missing is the Clippings feature, and users won’t be able to merge their saved clippings to the new platform. MerchantCircle will also offer Bloglines users customized local RSS feeds that users can opt into for hyper local news and deals. Smith adds that Bloglines has been tweaked slightly for a “richer, faster experience.”

Doug Leeds ,President of Ask.com says Ask was approached by a number of companies who were interested in giving new life to Bloglines but in the end MerchantCircle makes sense a new parent because they are “corporate cousins.”

Here’s the full email IAC will be sending to Bloglines users tomorrow:

As you may have heard, Ask.com has entered into an agreement with MerchantCircle who has agreed to keep Bloglines up and running. Stay tuned over the coming months as MerchantCircle works to improve the Bloglines service by creating a richer and more local user experience.

In the near term, your news feeds and access to the service (with your same password) are still available. You can read more detail about MerchantCircle and its plans for the service at the MerchantCircle blog.

For now, here’s what we want you to know:

Timing: Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service as is until December 1, 2010. After December 1, 2010, the service will transition wholly to MerchantCircle. During the month of December, you will be able to easily port your feeds over to the MerchantCircle-powered service. It’s an easy process, and we’ll provide you with complete instructions well in advance.

Logging-In: You will keep your same password as before.

Current Bloglines features: Your Bloglines subscriptions will seamlessly transition to the MerchantCircle service, however, the Clippings Tab will no longer be available and you will not be able to transport saved articles to the new service. We’re very sorry for any inconvenience this will cause – the infrastructure requirements and costs are simply too great to justify maintaining

Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).

Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). On the other side of the spectrum we – unsurprisingly – find MySpace (unique visitors down 5.53 percent for the month and 19.1 percent for the year) and MapQuest (down 5.8 for the month and 22.1 percent for the year).

If MySpace’s redesign will help buck the trend remains to be seen.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Yahoo’s Flickr.com seems to have lost some of its shine lately, showing a 14 percent decline in unique user visits in September 2010.

And what about IAC’s Ask.com, which actually jumped over online juggernauts such as Amazon.com and MSN.com last month, according to Compete’s data. The search engine is now ranked in sixth place, trailing sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and YouTube.

Other winners include Disney’s Go.com and Mozilla.com, which showed the largest monthly unique user visitor gains (15.8 percent and 30.5 percent, respectively).

On stage today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, recalled a story from the days when he backed Excite, one of the original Internet portals. Specifically, he spoke briefly about the time they failed to acquire Google.

This story has been circulated for a while, but not many people know about it. Khosla stated it simply: Google was willing to sell for under a million dollars, but Excite didn’t want to buy them.

Khosla, who was also a partner at Kleiner Perkins (which ended up backing Google) at the time, said he had “a lot of interesting discussions” with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at the time (early 1999). The story goes that after Excite CEO George Bell rejected Page and Brin’s $1 million price for Google, Khosla talked the duo down to $750,000. But Bell still rejected that.

Whoops. As of today, Google’s market cap stands at $167 billion.

Excite, meanwhile, was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2004. That company became Ask.com, and now it’s owned by Barry Diller’s IAC. As Diller stated at Disrupt today, Ask would probably be better off outside of IAC at this point.

What might have been…

Many of us may have forgotten that Ask.com is a search engine just like Google and Bing. It seems that IAC’s Barry Diller, who owns Ask.com, seems to have no memory of Ask’s value as well. Diller sat down with Michael Arrington today at TechCrunch Disrupt, and spoke candidly about the future of Ask.com.

Says Diller, “I don’t think Ask.com is going to gain search share; everyone copied us.” He added that Ask is not competitive with Google at all. When an audience member asked whether Ask would be more valuable outside of IAC rather than within the network; Diller quipped: Ask has no value inside of IAC, so why would it add value as a standalone site? He also said that IAC hasn’t been able to grow Ask the way he thought the company would be able to.

To Ask’s benefit, he did add that if you enter a natural language question into the search portal, Ask.com will give you a good answer. The company has tried to expand into the Q&A realm, recently launching a Quora-like feature to the search portal.

Ask, which was originally known as AskJeeves, was acquired by IAC in 2005 for $1.85 billion.

UPDATE: IAC and Barry Diller has issued this response: “I did not say that Ask has no value inside of IAC, period. In response to a specific question, I said that many of our assets are not ‘valued’ in the stock, and Ask is one of them…I was asked specifically if Ask would be better off with us or another company or standing alone. In the context of that question, I said that since it wasn’t valued in IAC – like so many of our businesses, because we have so many – that it would only be ‘valued’ stand alone.”

UPDATE 2: It was Google’s Don Dodge is person who posed the question to Diller; his interpretation seems to be the same as mine. Others reported the same response as well.

UPDATE 3: We looked at the video of Diller’s interview and he did definitely say Ask “has no value inside IAC,” but he was arguing more that the stock market doesn’t ascribe any value to it. Here is the full exchange, which starts at about the 24:30 mark (bold added for emphasis):

Q: “Do you believe Ask is worth more as a separate public company, or as part of IAC or as part of another company”

Diller: “Well you can never tell if it is worth more as part of another company because you don’t know what that other company would do with it. But as a standalone, I don’t think it would be, no. The truth is it has no value inside IAC, so I would think that it might have value standing alone. Because if you do a sum of the parts of IAC as against a private market value of any of these assets, and particularly Ask, I don’t think anybody ascribes any meaningful value to Ask.com“

Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams. Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. While we’ve heard in the past that IAC was considering shutting down the site, the company held off on killing the site permanently and was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines.

Doug Leeds, President of Ask.com tells us that the reasoning behind closing Bloglines came down to the fact that the market for people who use Bloglines (and RSS readers, he adds) isn’t growing, and is actually shrinking as people shift to realtime news streams such as Twitter to consume content on the web. In IAC’s market research, according to Leeds, there has been a 20 percent decline in people who are consuming RSS feeds as a whole. He says that Ask.com will continue to focus on drive traffic to and enhance its question and answer site.

Bloglines isn’t the first RSS reader to throw in the towel; Newsgator shut down its online newsreader last year. Now, Google Reader is all we have left; though even that product is slowly being replaced. We’ve put Bloglines in the TechCrunch Deadpool.

Of course, there are many other players in this space all of whom have tried to do the same thing or something similar. Answers.com, Ask.com, and more recently Aardvark (which Google acquired earlier this year), Facebook Answers, and Quora. Swingly says it has all of them beat because machine-drive Q+A services are too shallow while human-driven ones are too esoteric — Swingly aims to take the best of both worlds. And so far, they’ve mined the web for over 100 billion question and answer pairings to link up.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the Texas-based startup is that they’re not pretending to be perfect. They claim to be about 75 percent accurate right now. But just in case they can’t back that up, they show related Q&A pairing below their best match to make sure you get what you’re looking for. And that’s actually smart because apparently in their alpha testing of the product, people have proven hungry for knowledge and keep coming back for more. “Our engagement numbers are phenomenal,” the company says.

Again, Swingly’s big claim is that no other Q&A service has yet been able to operate at the scale at which they are right now. The team behind it has 10 years worth of experience building these type of semantic web systems. And we’re told that the parent company, LCC (Language Computer Corporation), has finished with 10 consecutive first place finishes in the annual TREC Question-Answering Evaluation (apparently, the ultimate nerdy Q&A systems challenge).

But really, all that matters here is how useful the service actually is in the real world. So Swingly is giving us 500 invites to dish out to TechCrunch readers. Simply use the code ‘techcrunch’ when you sign up and you’ll be granted access to the service when it’s fully live (which should be soon).

Swingly has also created a side-by-side comparison site so you can see how your questions are answered on their service versus how they are on the competitors. You can find that here (but you need to be logged in for it to work).

Need help thinking of some good questions? Here are some of the most excellent suggestions Swingly sent along:

• What do zombies eat?
• Where are Ballmer’s grandparents from?
• Who graduated from Haverford in 2002?
• What school did Lady Gaga go to?
• What director made A Clockwork Orange?
• What product did Novartis Medical Nutrition make?
• Which politicians died in 2008?
• How much was the first time homebuyer credit?
• Who directed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
• How many copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were sold?
• What killed the crocodile hunter?
• When did Steve Irwin die?
• Who is the highest paid player in Major League Soccer
• Who was the Mayor of Dallas in 1963?
• Who has Lindsay Lohan dated?
• What is the fastest animal in the world?
• What do llamas eat?
• What jobs has Martha Stewart had?
• Who did January Jones work for?
• What is January Jones height?
• Who is the coach of the Dallas Cowboys?

Also be sure to check out the videos below. Yes, they’ve smartly made a Facebook trailer spoof for their launch video — and one about how to kill zombies.

If you enjoy crossword puzzles, you are going to love Dictionary.com’s new iPhone app, Agent X Word. The app, which is $2.99 in the App Store, is the ultimate crossword solver. The new app leverages Dictionary.com’s proprietary natural-language technology and semantic search capabilities to provide an actual answer (or up to three hints if you just need a little help).

Agent X Word will provide more than two million hints and answers for over 30,000 crossword puzzles updated daily and claims to understand pop culture and current events. The app will offer definitions and synonyms for answers as well as other features such as recent search history and the ability to email answers to yourself or others. If you aren’t sure you want the answer revealed, the app can provide up to three hints per clue, to help you solve the puzzle yourself.

Dictionary.com’s free iPhone app, which launched in April, has been downloaded more than four million times. The app lets you look up definitions and synonyms from Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, reaching into a database of more than 275,000 definitions and 80,000 synonyms. The app also features audio pronunciations, similarly spelled words and Word of the Day. The company also recently launched a BlackBerry App and released its API to partners to incorporate into various applications, including e-books.

Dictionary.com was bought by IAC-run Ask.com in July of 2008 when the conglomerate bought Lexico, the operator of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.

We on the web are a simple folk — especially us males. We need but two things to keep us happy: Explosions and boobs. And thank God someone has finally cut through all the BS, and given us exactly what we want in one brilliant site called yes, Explosions and Boobs.

The site is actually more elaborate than it may seem at first glorious glance. If you click on either the explosion picture or the picture of the boobs, you will get new pictures of explosions and boobs! Brilliant. It’s hours of endless fun waiting to happen. Who needs to sit through an entire Michael Bay movie when you have this?

Just go to it and be amazed. Obviously, it may not be safe for everyone’s place of work. But it’s apparently safe enough for Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com to tweet about it. Or maybe not. As Michael tweets in response, “see this is why you got fired as CEO of Ask.com.“

Update: Alright, alright calm down. Lanzone wasn’t really fired as Ask.com CEO. But for those who read it on Twitter and assumed that it must be true, consider this the official debunking.

Sendori developed the technology, dubbed PureLeads and patent-pending, to enable both search advertisers and domain owners to benefit from typed-in domain traffic based on the highest auction bids. With rates for PPC (Pay-per-click) dramatically dropping the past few months, Sendori was quickly becoming a nice alternative for domain name owners who traditionally looked no further than the usual suspects offering PPC advertising deals.

Seems like a good match with Ask Sponsored Listings, an Ask.com unit which focuses on keyword targeted advertising on a rather large (+100) network of sites including properties like Match.com, TicketMaster, Ask.com, Evite, CitySearch, CNet, etc. Ask.com has also actively been purchasing valuable domain names and websites like Dictionary.com, Reference.com and Thesaurus.com. Sendori’s client roster includes names like Netflix, GEICO, Hewlett-Packard and other familiar brands.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but we suspect Sendori got a good deal as its model was clearly working: the company said it was providing 130,000 advertisers 33 million page views per month from direct navigation traffic at the time of the acquisition. From the 11 employees (including contractors), 10 will make the move over to IAC.

Update: per commenter Satanish and BusinessWeek, we’ve learned that Ask.com paid a decent $25 million for Sendori.

The startup had raised only $800,000 in Series A financing, from Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Maples Investments and Felicis Ventures.

(Source: DNJournal)

Search for Stocks on Ask’s experimental search page and you’ll get 13 advertisements and just 9 actual search results on the first page. Same for Mortgages, Cars, and thousands of other terms. For these searches, the first actual search result is 1,000 pixels down the page. Some queries, like Dogs, are a little more reasonable, with just four advertisements on the first page.

All of the major search engines are increasing the number of ads they serve on a page. But at least Google moves most of them over to the right side. Ask puts them above normal search results, so you have to actually scroll down (a lot) just to see the first search result. And Ask pulls other tricks as well, like making the entire horizontal space next to an advertisement clickable on the ad, which makes mistaken clicks happen quite easily as you are trying to scroll down.

If their goal is to destroy search market share, then they’ve got a great strategy.

Update: Note from Ask.com: “This is not a search experience you’d ever find by going directly to Ask.com. As you may know, we’ve actually recently decreased the number of ads on Ask.com and have fewer ads than even Google. It seems that you’ve found an edge case, where a syndication partner may have asked us to increase the number of ads for their traffic to meet their business needs – something other search engines do, as well.”

Ask’s comes next. And it’s clear they are being way too honest. The top search is Dictionary followed by MySpace, Google, YouTube and Facebook.

These aren’t searches, they’re navigation queries. Ah well.

Here’s the complete list:

1. Dictionary
2. MySpace
3. Google
4. YouTube
5. Facebook
6. Coupons
7. Cars
8. Craigslist
9. Online degrees
10. Credit score

In our continued testing we see all of our feeds now updating regularly on both the default and beta versions of the site.

But we’ve also heard that the service has been up for sale throughout this last summer, with no serious bidders so far (Microsoft and Newsgator may have had a passing interest). Bloglines was originally acquired in February 2005 for around $10 million, and our understanding is that Ask isn’t necessarily even looking for a break-even sale.

The Bloglines team is currently led by GM Eric Engleman, who we’ve heard has been doing a “heroic job” despite prolonged resource starvation by the parent company. Google Reader probably has 2-3x the number of engineers working on the product that Engleman has under him.

The reason that Bloglines has become the unwanted stepchild at Ask? It drives next to no revenue, and it’s excellent blog search engine has become less strategically important as Ask.com defocuses on competitive search.

It might be time to dust off that resume, Eric.

Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.

Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”

The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including this one (about a third of the feeds I follow have errors). This has been an ongoing problem. Meanwhile, those feeds are quite readable in other feed readers like Newsgator and Google Reader. The most recent TechCrunch post our 25,000+ Bloglines readers see is from May 14.

So what do you do if you are a Bloglines reader and ready to throw in the towel? Easy. Click the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom left of the page on Bloglines when you are signed in, and then import it into any feed reader you choose. Problem solved.

A few more Twitter users who are fed up with Bloglines:

Who needs Jerry Seinfeld when you’ve got a pole-dancing babe? Ask.com, the search engine formerly associated with a butler named Jeeves, is running an advertisement that features a voluptuous young woman doing acrobatic moves on a stripper pole under the heading “What are the best aerobic workouts?”

The ad may tell me nothing about the site’s technology or give me any reason to use it over Google, but it worked – I obediently ventured over to Ask.com to see if they had somehow managed to make search sexy (they didn’t). The results were just as mundane as they’ve always been, but the ad still drove me to the site.

Contrast this with the “edgy” ad campaign Ask used last year that was headed by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which incorporated bizarre references to the Unabomber and urine-themed ads. The campaign failed to drive any traffic, and was abandoned only $15 million into the $100 million contract.

The same firm was in charge of Microsoft’s recent botched campaign featuring Bill Gates and Seinfeld. Microsoft has since shifted the campaign in a more successful direction (many think the shift occurred ahead of schedule, though the company maintains it went as planned), but should Microsoft ever decide to bail on Crispin it can rely on the same mantra that Ask has fallen back on: sex sells.

Ask.com is no stranger to displaying scantily-clad women in its ads – last year it ran one featuring a line of women promoting (but totally unrelated to) The Algorithm. We should also note that while Crispin has had its share of ill-received ad campaigns, it has also had some strokes of genius, including the Subservient Chicken.

The last time I used ask.com to search for anything, the New England Patriots had a losing record. That was before Google came into its own, storing each and every one of my searches on its servers for all eternity. Now ask.com, seeing the heightened attention paid to privacy, has rolled out a new feature that will erase your searches from its servers—feel free to search “britney spears reading book.” One of ask.com’s vice presidents for Something or Other said the new feature, called AskEraser, was akin to a light switch. Once switched on, AskEraser will prevent your sensitive search information from finding a permanent home on its servers.

Yes, good for ask.com and all, but just know that some of the ads ask.com displays are handled by Google, which will not be deleting your personal information any time soon, AskEraser or not.

For me, it’s like this: until the default search on Safari is something other than Google, I’ll continue to send all my info to Mountain View.

Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy [New York Times]

Taking a look at IAC’s earnings today, it is not clear whether or not the expensive ad campaign will even pay for itself. Out of IAC’s $1.5 billion in total quarterly revenue, its media and advertising businesses (of which Ask.com is a part, along with CitySearch and Evite) accounted for only $190 million. While those revenues were up 40 percent from last year, the search portion of that saw a greater contribution from the Ask network (search results it powers on other sites) than from Ask.com itself. In other words, IAC’s media and advertising businesses saw a $54 million bump in revenues last quarter. Not all of that was due to Ask, and of the part that was, more than half came from traffic outside of Ask.com. The point of the ads, of course, is to drive traffic to Ask’s main site.

At least Ask is not losing market share. According to comScore, the search market share of Ask’s network as a whole nudged up 0.2 percent in September versus August to 4.7 percent (compared to 57 percent market share for Google, 23.7 percent for Yahoo, and 10.3 percent for Microsoft). Both Google and Yahoo still gained more share in September than Ask.com, although it did take some share away from Microsoft. And if you look on Compete.com, traffic to Ask.com itself does look to be picking up.

UpdateIt’s been pointed out to me by someone who know that the $100 million is the total amount the search engine is spending on marketing worldwide, including much more than the TV spots (such as online ads, agency fees, and internal marketing salaries). The TV spots are still a significant chunk of it, but not the majority. Also, the most recent TV ad campaign just started in September. This Hitwise graph suggests that it contributed to a nice 23.7 percent jump in Ask’s share of executed searches from August, 2007

So it could just be too early to tell whether the TV ads are driving enough traffic to Ask.com to be worthwhile. But if they don’t show up more significantly in the numbers next quarter, those ads will be seen as a boondoggle. They are entertaining, though.

Enjoy the latest one, which pokes fun at Google (and which makes you think that maybe Ask won’t be renewing its search advertising relationship with Google when the deal expires at the end of the year):

As far as search goes, most of us probably use Google. Though lately, Ask.com may have captured a few Googlers thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign based around “the algorithm”. Now, in an effort to retain those new users and stay alive in the search-engine market, Ask is offering AskEraser. This new utility will allow searchers to remove their search results from Ask’s databases so that searches can’t be traced back to your IP.

This is a great feature for someone on a public computer, work computer, or a privacy nut. Otherwise, it’s nothing special. Ask has also stated that it will drop its data-retention policy down to 18 months, just like Google does. All these features still don’t mean you get to surf anonymously. The big problem is that Ask doesn’t delete your records instantly. It takes a few weeks to get the job done. Could AskEraser be a big boost for the company? Sure, but it’s not the answer to defeating Google.

Ask.com To Launch AskEraser To Erase Search History & New Data Retention Policy [SEL]

I guess what he was looking for was a bunch of singing women with swords.

The ad also briefly shows some of the features from Ask3D, which was released last night. Still no word from Ask PR on our request for comment, and I don’t think we’re going to be hearing from them.