ComScore just published its latest U.S. search market numbers and things aren’t looking too good for Yahoo. Yahoo’s Bing-powered search lost another 0.6 percentage points and now has just 12.2% of the market. That’s down from 12.8% in August and 13% in July and June. → Read More
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the… → Read More
Barry Diller realizes that his Ask search engine isn’t going to gain market share anytime soon, but search can still power growth for IAC if it just keeps up with the growth in the overall search market. IAC released third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were up 25 percent to $422 million. Operating income quadrupled to $36 million, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.32… → Read More
If you ask that question on Yahoo Answers, you’ll probably get something about how a husband’s Xbox was once used for Netflix, but now it doesn’t work. If you ask that question on WolframAlpha, you’ll get get some abstract data about money spent on various things each year. If you ask that question on Bing, you’ll get a bunch of old content. Both Ask.com and Google give you the answer if you dig… → Read More
The search engine Ask is about to submit an iPhone app to Apple designed for asking questions on the go. About a year ago, Ask returned to its roots as a place to ask and answer questions. Roughly 35 to 40 percent of all search queries typed into Ask are in the form of a question, versus maybe 6 to 9 percent for other search engines, according to Ask president Doug Leeds. Ask’s main search page… → Read More
All the fuss about Microsoft finally posing a credible challenge to Google with Bing, its new search engine, misses the real primary target of Microsoft’s search efforts: Yahoo. Microsoft knows it can’t unseat Google anytime soon, but it does have a fighting chance of taking down Yahoo to soften it for an acquisition or simply take over the No. 2 spot in search. Even that day is still a long… → Read More
One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and … → Read More
The downturn in the economy is apparently leading more than the usual number of ambitious click-fraudsters to try their luck. And that’s causing ad networks to think a lot more about click fraud and the overall health of their networks, says Anchor Intelligence CEO Ken Miller. We first wrote about the company in late 2007 when they unveiled their click fraud product.
The company has always been… → 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… → Read More
Although Google keeps gaining search engine market share, people’s loyalties are far from locked in. J.P. Morgan Internet analyst Imran Khan recently conducted a survey to see if Web consumers would be willing to switch search engines. He found that 62 percent would. The biggest reason that would cause them to change? Better search results (45 percent of all respondents said this would make… → Read More
Update 2: Corrected figures are below, as are the originally reported figures for comparison. The mistake was in Ask’s numbers. Its market share declined half a percentage point to 4.3 percent instead of increasing to 5.4 percent.
Ahead of Thursday’s earnings announcement from Google, comScore just released its search market share figures for September. Google’s overall share of search queries… → Read More
Google keeps gaining search market share in the U.S., but its global dominance is not as great as previously indicated. Last night, comScore released its search market share and query growth numbers for July and Lehman Brothers reported the numbers in a note this morning. Here are the main search market share percentage numbers in the U.S. from comScore: Company—–July search… → Read More
The University of Michigan’s quarterly customer satisfaction index came out today, and in the Website category Google came out on top with a score of 86 out of 100 (up 10 percent from last year). Yahoo slipped 3 percent to a score of 77. MSN’s score was flat at 75, and tied with NYTimes.com and ABCNews.com. AOL came in at 69, and that is 3 percent better than last year. Here are some… → Read More
Rumors last week that Ask, the IAC-owned search engine, was about to cut 100 jobs overestimated the body count. In fact, Ask is trimming 40 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce. Newly appointed CEO Jim Safka, who replaced Jim Lanzone, is also going to refocus the brand to go after women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users (65… → Read More
Ask is rumored to be considering switching to Google for search and subsequently downsizing its engineering team. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Ask may abandon or selling its Teoma search engine in favor of using Google for its search results. Teoma has powered Ask since it was acquired in September 2001. The decision will result in “bad news for Ask Engineers.” Paid Content puts… → Read More
Silicon Alley Insider reports that Ask has just launched a news site called Big News in partnership with Digg that, from the looks of things, only partially incorporates social news functionality. There were rumors just earlier this week that Digg was white labeling its technology for Ask. However, Big News is more akin to Google News or TechMeme than to Digg. The bulk of the news items collected… → Read More
While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S. In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent… → Read More
IAC got serious about its Ask property this year, investing $100 million in the United States alone on a bizarre “Ask the Algorithm” campaign that even sunk to the depths of using the Unabomber as a marketing tool. Unfortunately for good taste there’s nothing like a bit controversy to draw attention to a service and Ask’s traffic was up this year, proving once again perhaps… → Read More
AOL’s data leak. Project Beacon’s fallout. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about your privacy online, so it’s understandable why Ask would be proactive in letting users control their data with a new program called “AskEraser”. When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com… → Read More
A strong second quarter by IAC saw a 78% increase in profits, mostly driven by assets sales and reduced costs. The positive headline results did not flow through to the struggling 4th ranked search engine Ask.com, which saw a decline in revenues. The second quarter decline comes despite a $100 million Crispin, Porter + Bogusky advertising campaign that should be resulting in increased traffic and… → Read More
After a week where Ask launched AskEraser, a product that allows users to erase their search history, and Google announced a reduction in retained data time from 2038 to 18 months, more privacy initiatives are on their way. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will officially announce Monday “new policies and technologies to protect the privacy of users of its Live Search… → Read More
As much as I would have thought such a post title would have been absurd a week ago, it could happen. According to the latest search market share figures released by Compete, MSN/ Live increased its market share by 67% from May to June 2007, putting Microsoft’s share of search at 13.2% behind Yahoo at 19.6% and Google on 62.7%. Over the year, Microsoft’s search traffic is up 47%. → Read More
Ask’s latest musical advertisement is out, and apparently the search engine under-dog can help you find Kato Kaelin, an obscure non-celebrity that according to Wikipedia is known for a minor role in the OJ Simpson trial. Advertisement as below. I was always under the presumption that one of the key points of advertising was finding a connection with your audience. When people talk about Ask… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
