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.
Too busy to book airline tickets, order takeout food, or call your parents? For $19 per month, virtual personal assistants from AskSunday.com will run 10 such errands for you.
Welcome to the world of online errand outsourcing, where on sites like AskSunday.com and GetFriday.com, ordinary people can get assistance with everyday tasks, for a small amount. SFGate recently ran an Associated Press article on the phenomenon, citing the growing number of Web sites that are making it easier to outsource virtual errands overseas to countries like India, China, and Bangladesh.
Some of the more unusual tasks handled by GetFriday.com include:
• Daily wakeup calls that also deliver the local weather report and instructions to get up, make the bed, and exercise
• Reading bedtime stories to children over the phone
• Buying underwear on behalf of clients (online purchase only, the company points out)
• Talking to mom and dad in a client's stead
AskSunday.com provides its service 24-7. At GetFriday.com, clients get a personal assistant working in time zone-specific shifts, available from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., for instance.Virtual assistants for individuals and small businesses represent a small but growing market. Last year, the estimated revenue for these services was $250 million, according to research firm Evalueserve, which expects the market to grow to $2 billion by 2015.
For more specific tasks, there are sites like Guru.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that helps employers find freelancers helping with Web design, language translation, and photography. Guru.com launched its online job board in 2000 and has a rating system similar to that of eBay, with reviews from earlier customers, as well as hourly rates, yearly earnings, and locations of the freelancers.
Another site where customers can search professionals based on rate, location, earnings, or feedback is Mountain View, Calif.-based Elance.
Elance and Guru.com are not only platforms for low-wage workers in the developing world, but also for Westerners. Will sites like this level the playing field of the global economy?
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.
Google's Webmaster Central has become a very important resource for anyone who has a Web site, works on a Web site, or, like SEO practitioners, helps others with their Web sites.
Google continues to roll out more features and better functionality to existing features, and now they just did a little bit of both with the addition of their Generate robots.txt function.
Google had previously added a robots.txt analyzer, which at this point is still the more useful of the two tools. For those who aren't aware, the robots exclusion protocol helps with instructing search engines how to interact with a Web site. There are a number of directives available, but the main purpose of the robots.txt file is to instruct the search engines about content that a site owner doesn't want the robots to crawl.
Why in the world would you not want search engines to crawl any of your content? You may have content that, for whatever reason, you don't want others to find through search results. Note, however, that this is not the same as secure information that requires authentication through a log-in.
Your site may have its own search function that creates "search results" for your site. Search engines generally do not want to include search results within search results, so this content may not be returned for searches on the engines anyway, so you might want to focus the crawlers elsewhere for greater crawler efficiency.
Or you may have duplicate content issues that you could use robots.txt to filter out. This is especially common with a content management system (CMS) that creates a separate printer-friendly page.
Regardless of your specific needs, having a robots.txt file can be important to a site. Rarely is there a site that can't benefit from disallowing at least some content. Even if you have nothing to disallow, you may want to take advantage of the auto-discovery feature for your XML sitemap. Finally, depending on your server log system or analytics package, not having a robots.txt file can be problematic if it inflates your "404 File Not Found" error reporting, which can happen because search engine spiders will request the robots.txt file automatically when they come to your site.
Right now, the robots.txt generator is rather basic and I hope that Google will add more features to it going forward. Currently, site owners have to paste in URLs and URL patterns to build the file. It would be great if it would provide a list of URLs or patterns extracted from a site to help automate the procedure for anyone not familiar with the protocol.
There is more information about the protocol, though a bit more on the technical side, at the robotstxt.org site and you can find more engine specific information on crawling and robots.txt from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com.
One important tip is that the following directive tells all spiders they are allowed to go anywhere:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
And, more importantly, the following directive, which I sometimes see when I think people really wanted the above:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The latter tells the spiders to stay out of the entire site--clearly two very different results, so be sure you understand which does what.
Blu-ray: The future of high-def (or is it?)
(Credit: Sony)HD DVD is dead. But does that mean Blu-ray is the one and only high-def option? If so, what's the best Blu-ray player to buy? Or will HD downloads be the next big thing?
Don't have the answers? No worries: I'll be taking all of your Blu-ray and HD home theater questions during our weekly CNET Ask the Editors chat session. To take part, bookmark the link below and drop by on Thursday, March 6 at 11:00 a.m. PT/2:00 p.m. ET:
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12548_102-0.html?forumID=136&threadID=285768
Hope to see you there.
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.
(Credit:
Ask.com)
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.
(Credit:
Ask.com)
Reminder: I'll be live from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Time, today.
I had so much fun reporting in real time from the Demo 2008 conference (see my liveblog), that I thought it would be fun to do the same thing again, but more free-form, and as a two-way conversation. So I'm doing a CNET Ask the Editors show on Thursday from 11:00 AM to noon, Pacific time.
Ask the Editors is a live text show. You ask, and I answer (or fake it). Tune in on Thursday to ask me about Web applications. I'll field how-to questions, make product suggestions, discuss new business models, anything. In the course of my too-long technology journalism career, I have reviewed and used more products than I can count. I have interviewed more than 1,000 start-up CEOs and evaluated their business prospects. One could say that I have some perspective.
I also believe that Web-based applications are the future of software. So drop in on Thursday and let's talk about it.
