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. → Read More
There’s a fairly insane rush currently underway to launch new services in time for SXSW next week. Most of these are obviously startups hoping to hit it big at the conference and ride that success to greatness just as Twitter and Foursquare did. And then there’s another player, of an entirely different scale, looking to leverage the conference with a brand new location-based app: Ask.com.
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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). → Read More
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. → Read More
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 grown Ask the way he thought the company would be able to. → Read More
It’s finally happened. Bloglines,the troubled RSS feed reader owned by IAC, will officially be shut down, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The site has had a tumultuous history, so it’s unsurprising that IAC has finally put the platform out of its misery. Bloglines, which is actually operated by IAC Q&A property Ask.com, will be informing users of the news today and will officially be shut down on October 1.
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. → Read More
An insane number of searches on the web involve people asking questions. Sometimes they’re good questions, sometimes they’re stupid questions, sometimes they’re insane questions. Just start typing something into Google beginning with the words “How” or “Why” for proof of this — the auto-suggest speaks for itself. Sadly, Google isn’t great at answering questions because they’re a search engine that mainly returns hyperlinks. Sure, your answer may reside on one of those pages, but that requires another click and some browsing. A new service launching out of stealth mode tonight, Swingly, wants to perfect this task.
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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? → Read More
Ask Sponsored Listings, a division of Ask.com (itself a subsidiary to IAC) has acquired Sendori, a startup that introduced interesting advertising exchange technology about two years ago that enabled advertisers to purchase direct navigation traffic generated by top tier domain names, bypassing PPC advertising providers like Google and Yahoo when it comes to monetizing parked domains.
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
It’s the season for top searches, and Ask.com just doesn’t know how to play the game. To compile these, big search engines take all the top search terms for the year and promptly throw the data out. They then compile a list of terms that they think properly reflects key trends that people are looking for, occasionally looking at the actual data for guidance. We saw Yahoo’s list earlier today.
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. → Read More
Bloglines got a much needed band-aid this weekend that fixed the feed update problem that has plagued users for weeks and caused long-gone founder Mark Fletcher to write “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”
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. → Read More
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). 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. → Read More
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.
[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AdCKDou8cA]
→ Read More
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] → Read More
After sprucing up Ask.com earlier last summer, parent company IAC began spending $100 million this year on marketing to raise awareness of the Ask brand. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing a lot of Ask.com ads on TV lately. (And I pretty much only watch TiVo, yet they are so ubiquitous that they still catch my eye as I fast-forward through the commercials). So how is that ad campaign doing? 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 → Read More
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] → Read More
Ok, we got a copy of the actual Ask.com TV ad we mentioned earlier today and uploaded it to YouTube. This will supposedly be broadcast on TV tonight for the first time. The basic idea of the ad is a guy singing “I got what I was looking for,” with singing women in the background singing “He got what he was looking for. 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. → Read More
