Ask.com, the fourth-ranked search engine, has completed its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.
Ask.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of InterActiveCorp, had announced the all-cash deal in mid-May. Financial terms of the deal, which closed Thursday, were not released. Lexico, a privately held company based in Long Beach, Calif., debuted in 1995 with Dictionary.com.
Altogether, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com had more than 28 million unique visitors in March, according to Lexico.
In May, Ask.com said the acquisition would increase its unique monthly users by 11 percent to 145 million.
According to statistics-tracker Hitwise, Ask.com had 4.23 percent of the U.S. search market in May. Microsoft had 5.89 percent, Yahoo had 19.95 percent, and Google overwhelmed them all with 68.29 percent.
Ask.com, the fourth-ranked search engine, plans to increase its heft through an agreement to acquire Lexico Publishing Group, which operates the Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com Web sites.
Ask.com didn't release terms of the acquisition, but Lexico is "highly profitable, with high double-digit growth for a couple years," said Jim Safka, chief executive of the IAC-owned search site. And by using Ask.com's advertising relationship with Google on the Lexico sites, the company should be able to increase the ad revenue.
Adding Lexico's Web visitor count will increase Ask.com's monthly visitors to 145 million, according to ComScore statistics, Safka said. "Overnight, our unique users will increase by 11 percent, which is outstanding," he said.
Ask far trails its biggest rival, Google, but some other competitors are within striking distance. According to search market share statistics from HitWise released Wednesday, Google had 67.25 percent share of U.S. searches in April to Yahoo's 20.28 percent, Microsoft's 6.26 percent, and Ask.com's 4.17 percent.
Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo saga raised the prospect of consolidation of two of Safka's competitors.
But Safka thinks the months-long back-and-forth distracted the companies, and the news that activist shareholder Carl Icahn might take on Yahoo's board left him gleeful.
"I love it," Safka said. "Just when you thought Microsoft and Yahoo were going to get on with their lives, it's going to paralyze them once again."
Google gained market share in the United States over search rivals in March, rising 0.53 percentage points to an all-time high of 59.8 percent, according to new ComScore results released Tuesday.
"We were somewhat surprised at the March uptick, especially since the company had previously alluded that the unusual Easter timing could impact search activity," said Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney in a report Tuesday that quoted the ComScore numbers.
Yahoo, meanwhile, slipped 0.3 percentage points to 21.3 percent, and Microsoft dropped 0.2 percentage points to 9.4 percent--both figures are record lows for the companies, Mahaney said.
Lower in the rankings, AOL dropped 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 percent, while Ask.com rose 0.1 percentage points to 4.7 percent for March, according to the report.
The number of searches increased 18 percent compared to March 2007. Google's tally rose 18.4 percent, Yahoo dropped 1.8 percent, and Microsoft increased 9.4 percent.
As expected, Ask.com is cutting 40 jobs--8 percent of its work force--as part of a restructuring to refocus the search company toward providing answers to its core audience of women searching on entertainment, health, and reference topics, the company said on Tuesday.
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Meanwhile, the company said it will be hiring some new employees to help with the transition, as well as add more community-generated responses and look for partners. Teoma will remain part of the search technology, the company said.
The reorganization, Safka's first move since assuming the CEO spot from Jim Lanzone in January, is aimed at helping Ask.com grow its market share from the current 5 percent. Competing head-on with the Google and the others hasn't narrowed the gap, so the idea is to focus on a core demographic and answers to questions, specifically.
Given that Yahoo laid off more than 1,000 workers last month, Google is suddenly looking at some surprising slow growth in paid search ad numbers, and Microsoft is looking to buy Yahoo to better compete in search and ads, it's not such a surprise that the No. 4 search engine would be hitting snags of its own.
Although, Ask.com has undergone more cosmetic surgery than most, changing its name from Ask Jeeves, dropping the butler logo, redesigning the site numerous times and shaking up management along the way.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoffs.
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that there could be layoffs at Ask.com and that IAC is thinking about dumping the Teoma search engine in favor of Google.
But a person very familiar with the matter told CNET News.com that Ask.com will stick with Teoma.
Ask.com spokesman Nicholas Graham declined to comment on the potential for layoffs.
Ask.com has undergone so many makeovers it's hard to keep track. A site redesign last year, along with management changes in the past few years, has failed to significantly change its market share.
Ask.com has quietly launched a news page called "BigNews" that aggregates top news stories from a variety of sites ranging from The New York Times to small blogs.
The company, whose parent company InterActiveCorp is having troubles of its own over plans to split off its different brands, enters a crowded field with more established news aggregators like Yahoo, Microsoft, and even Google, as well as sites like Digg and Topix.
Ask.com says the news page stories are dynamically generated based on freshness, source authority, social media references, article content, and multimedia availability. You can use a source filter to search for stories based on geographic region and track stories via the site or RSS.
The top stories on the site Thursday afternoon were Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dropping out of the race, the Shuttle Atlantis launch, U.S. Defense Secretary defending NATO's mission in Afghanistan, two studies concluding that biofuels are not so green, and a Utah couple and their dog rescued after being stranded for 12 days in the snow.
By contrast, Romney, Atlantis, and a story on a baby found alive amid the wreckage of a tornado in Tennessee led on Yahoo News, which was similar to news on the MSN and AOL portals. Google News led with Romney, mob raids in Italy and the U.S., and a standoff between police and a gunman in Los Angeles.
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Liberty Media, which owns a majority voting stake in IAC, has filed a court action to remove Barry Diller and others from the IAC board and replace them with Liberty nominees, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
The moves come a week after Liberty and IAC sued each other over IAC's plans to spin off a majority of its business units into new companies. Under the restructuring, announced in November, search site Ask.com and its advertising business will remain inside IAC, while LendingTree, Ticketmaster, and others are spun off.
Ask.com Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone is leaving the company in a management shake-up at parent InterActiveCorp, the company announced late Wednesday.
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Lanzone took over the CEO spot in April 2006 when then-CEO Steve Berkowitz left to head up Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live expansion. Lanzone will serve as entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures while remaining in an advisory role at Ask.com for a few months.
The Ask.com leadership change comes as IAC prepares to spin off HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval International, and Lending Tree.
"These changes are intended to strengthen and streamline the operating structure at IAC, both leading up to our intended spin-offs, and beyond," Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, said in a statement. He credited Lanzone with turning around Ask.com in the last two years.
Lanzone will be replaced by Jim Safka, who will also continue as CEO of Primal Ventures, a venture unit for IAC that incubates business for. Safka, 39, previously was CEO of Match.com and held management positions at AT&T Wireless and E-Trade Financial and worked at Intuit, Warner Bros., and Paramount Pictures.
Meanwhile, Scott Garell has been named president of Ask.com. Garell has been CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, which includes Evite, since 2005. Prior to that he was executive vice president of domestic sites and search, including Ask.com.
Replacing Garell is John Park, currently executive vice president and general manager of toolbars and portals within the portals division.
Despite dumping the Ask Jeeves name and redesigning the site last year, Ask.com remains the No. 4 search engine, behind Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, but ahead of AOL. Ask.com's U.S. market share has inched up over the past year to 4.1 percent from 3.7 percent, according to Hitwise. It was 5 percent in mid-2006, Hitwise reported.
IAC acquired Ask.com in 2005 for $1.5 billion.
Ask.com on Thursday launched a free service that lets users of Web-enabled mobile devices get directions just by speaking.
With "Click to Speak" you say your location and the address of where you want to go or the closest intersection. Within a few seconds you will receive a text message with a link to directions that can be used for walking or driving. No need to type in addresses.
Ask.com's Mobile Directions home page let's you say the start and end addresses to get directions.
(Credit: sk.com)Ask.com Mobile works on any mobile Web browser and does not require a download. Carrier and data charges may apply.
Ask.com is the first of the large search engines to provide a voice-activated service of this type, but there are other companies, like Microsoft's Tellme, that provide business listings, maps and directions for mobile users who want to use their voice instead of their hands.
A group of privacy advocates is asking Ask.com to make some changes to its new AskEraser feature so that it better protects consumers' privacy when they conduct Web searches.
Ask launched its AskEraser feature last week, touting it as a tool that erases traces of a consumer's search activity within hours.
"After a more careful review of AskEraser, we have found at least three significant flaws," a letter addressed to Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Lanzone states. It is signed by Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as representatives from the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Fairfax County Privacy Council, National Workrights Institute, Privacy Rights Now Coalition, Privacy Times, and World Privacy Forum.
"We believe that the flaws are correctable, and hope that you will work to bring the reality of AskEraser in line with your stated objective of protecting your customers' privacy," the letter says.
Ask.com spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company had just received an e-mailed copy of the letter and was in the process of reviewing it.
"On first glance, we think the issues raised in the letter are not new, and are addressed already in our FAQ and our Privacy Policy. That said, we're happy to talk to Mr. Rotenberg and others about it and address any questions they have," Graham said, adding that Ask has collaborated on the feature with "respected privacy advocates" such as the Center for Democracy & Technology.
The letter lists three main problems. The first one is the fact that AskEraser uses an opt-out cookie. Cookies are bits of software left on a consumer's computer that are used to authenticate the user and maintain information such as the user's site preferences.
Usually, people concerned with privacy delete cookies, so creating an opt-out cookie is "counter-intuitive," the letter states. Once the AskEraser opt-out cookie is deleted, the privacy setting is lost and the consumer's search activity will be tracked. Why not have an opt-in cookie instead, the letter suggests.
Ask.com's AskEraser inserts a text string in the content field of a cookie that details exactly when the privacy feature was enabled, which privacy groups say is unnecessary.
(Credit: Electronic Privacy Information Center)The second problem is that Ask inserts the exact time that the user enables AskEraser and stores it in the cookie, which could make identifying the computer easier and make it easy for third-party tracking if the cookie were transferred to such parties. The letter recommends using a session cookie that expires once the search result is returned.
Ask's Frequently Asked Questions for the feature notes that there may be circumstances when Ask is required to comply with a court order and if asked to, it will retain the consumer's search data even if AskEraser appears to be turned on. Ask should notify consumers when the feature has been disabled so that people are not misled into thinking their searches aren't being tracked when they actually are, the letter said.
Ask announced plans for AskEraser in July, just days after Google said search cookies would expire after two years instead of in 2038. Earlier in the year, Google had said it would anonymize the final eight bits of the IP address and the cookie data after somewhere between 18 months and 24 months.
Privacy has become a hot topic for search engines this year following a mishap at AOL last year that exposed the searches of hundreds of thousands of consumers. Lawmakers in the U.S. have held hearings about online privacy, particularly with regard to Google's proposed acquisition of online ad firm DoubleClick, while a hearing is planned for January in Europe.
