Search toolbars are big business for security software company AVG and media company IAC. But could revenue from these toolbars be in danger, as Google says it is stepping up enforcement of its policies against shady behavior related to toolbar downloads? IAC's Mindspark makes substantial revenues through search toolbars, and AVG, in September 2011, said it had made about 20% of its revenues (or around $40 million) from Yahoo and Google combined that year to date. People install these toolbars for the promise of security or entertainment. Then, when they conduct searches, they get back [...]

Related Topics: Ask | Channel: SEM | Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Top News

Quixey and Ask have entered into a deal in which apps from Quixey's database, whether for mobile or the PC, will be integrated into search results. It's going live today and should be rolling out now, although it's not yet live for me. Apps in Ask search results will be from Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry. Tomer Kagan, co-founder and CEO of Quixey, says that apps can equally be "answers" to search queries. Apps thus become one more content category for end users. While app search has existed for some time in specialized sites and app stores, the further mainstreaming of app [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search | Top News

Ask.com's 100 million users remain almost as loyal as Twihards, prompting us to ask if searchers are on Team Jeeves or Team Diller when putting in their queries. For the 2012 installment of the series in hot searches, Ask added a new twist to the searcher saga, layering in a thicker plot and seeking a more satisfying end to the year by putting context around searcher motivations and perceptions about the most popular headlines. For the first time ever, the top asked questions are accompanied by select insights from an online survey, 2012: What’s on America’s Mind?, conducted within [...]

Related Topics: Ask | Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search | Search & Society: General | Top News

Only 89.33% of internet searches in the UK were conducted on Google sites last month, according to Experian Hitwise. It's the first time in the last five years that Google search market share in the UK has ever dipped below 90%. While Google's share dropped, other players -- especially Microsoft's Bing -- picked up market share. Bing grew to encompass 4.71% of all searches, which was a 2012 peak for the engine. Experian Hitwise suspects that October's launch of Windows 8 -- which uses Bing as the default search engine -- may have been a factor in Bing's share increase. Yahoo sites an [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Strategy | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size | Top News

We recently received an email from a reader who'd made an inquiry with Google AdWords support. Why, this reader had asked, is Ask.com allowed to buy AdWords and rank for certain surprising terms, when its landing page features mostly ads above the fold? Doesn't that violate Google's policies on arbitrage? All About Arbitrage Arbitrage, when it comes to Google AdWords, is when a advertiser hopes it can buy traffic from Google for less than it makes off ads on its own site. In other words, say a company buys an ad for $0.60 per click on Google. Visitors click on that ad, come to the adverti [...]

Related Topics: Ask | Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | Google: AdWords | Top News

Ask.com has 3.5 percent of the search market according to comScore. Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds told Bloomberg that number may seem small but it makes his site the seventh largest in the US, "with 100 million people every month." Rather than claiming that his search market share will continue to grow, Leeds proclaims that "the search wars are over and Google's won." He says that the people who go to Ask "represent a different use case all together. It's people asking questions." On What Ask Does Now "We're serving people who want to get an answer to a question right now," explains Leeds. He [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search

We're getting the usual sneak peek at comScore data from financial analysts ahead of the official release tomorrow. In terms of the market-share horse race, Google gained ground vs. last month. Bing was flat; AOL and especially Ask gained as well. Sadly, Yahoo experienced another month of decline -- to its lowest market share in memory. And now, behold the September comScore numbers: Google: 66.7 percent (66.4 percent in August) Bing: 15.9 percent (15.9 percent in August) Yahoo: 12.2 percent (12.8 percent in August) Ask: 3.5 percent (3.2 percent in August) AOL: 1.8 percent (1.7 [...]

Related Topics: AOL | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Strategy | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: Compete | Top News | Yahoo: Search

It seems like there are a million apps launching or promoting themselves in connection with the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Among them is Pollroll a new Q&A mobile app from Ask.com. Pollroll, according to Ask, "is designed to facilitate the creation, distribution and sharing of poll questions and results." In addition to answering polls users many annotate their responses with comments. And polls can be shared on Facebook and Twitter. There is a location element here ("Where's the best Austin BBQ spot?") as well as the ability to ask more general questions that don't p [...]

Related Topics: Ask | Ask: Mobile | Channel: Mobile | Top News

You've probably read the news already that Scroogle is gone forever. It launched back in 2003 and was popular among searchers who wanted to get Google search results in a private setting. Now that it's gone, where can searchers go for a more private search experience than Google and Bing offer by default? Here's a list of a few alternatives. Note that different search engines below make different privacy-related claims; I haven't investigated them in detail -- i.e., by examining cookies, etc. -- so anyone looking for a private search experience should do his/her own research. Private Sea [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Consumer | DuckDuckGo | Features: General | Google: Privacy | Google: Web Search | Legal: Privacy | Search Engines: IxQuick & Startpage | Top News

Google has a pretty sophisticated logo, aka Google Doodle, today on their home page for Valentine's Day. Also celebrating with special logos and home pages are Bing, Yahoo and even Baidu. The logo features Tony Bennett's Cold Cold Heart and an animated YouTube video representing love and Valentine's Day. Here is a video demo of the logo: What a pretty and warm logo! Google is not the only search engine with logos, we have logos from Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, Dogpile, Baidu and others. Here they are: Past Search Industry Valentine's Day Logos: Google’s Va [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos | Microsoft: Bing | Yahoo: General

The longest search queries are happening on Ask.com, where users average almost five words per search. That's according to research from Chitika. The ad network analyzed search referrals on "hundreds of millions" of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals -- at an average of 4.81 words -- came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied. It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search | Search & Society: General | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | Stats: Search Behavior

Welcome to 2012 and Happy New Years Day everyone! We wanted to share with you the logos and themes from the search engines for New Years! Google had two different logos, one for New Years Eve and the other for New Years Day. Bing had an outstanding video home page background: Yahoo had this nice Flash animated logo: Ask.com: Dogpile: Baidu: Sogou: Also, you do not want to miss the best Google logos for 2011. [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Promotions | Baidu | Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos | Microsoft: Marketing | Top News

It's been about a year since Ask went back to its roots as a full Q&A site and at the end of last year, we offered up its most popular questions of 2010. In that story from 2010, note that Ask.com claimed 90 million users at that time, and in this year's followup release of the most popular questions, Ask.com cited their 60 million users helped predict what's to come in 2012 (see below). According to Comscore's September 2011 web property rankings however, Ask remained around 90 million unique users, and reported in October that Ask's search share remained steady. Whether it's 60 or [...]

Related Topics: Ask | Channel: Consumer | Search & Society | Search & Society: General

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! Below is a collection of the 2011 Thanksgiving logos and themes from the search engine industry. Including Google's logo , which went live a couple days ago, and logos from Yahoo, Bing, Dogpile, Ask.com, and others. Today will be a light coverage schedule on Search Engine Land. Enjoy the day and the time with family and friends! Google: Yahoo: Bing: Ask.com: Dogpile: Related Logos: Google Does Thanksgiving Logo Early, First Ever One Sharable On Google+ Pre-Thanksgiving Google Logo Leads To Chef Ina Garten Recipes [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos | Microsoft: Bing | Top News | Yahoo: Marketing

Yusuf Mehdi, who reportedly is the " longest-running executive in Microsoft’s Online Services Division," (which houses Bing) is heading over to the company's Xbox division. Reasons for the shift aren't entirely clear. But Mehdi is a key executive for "OSD" and was instrumental in the creation and successful launch of Bing. According to the internal memo obtained by Geekwire, Mehdi and his tenure are described as follows: Yusuf has been involved with leading Microsoft Online Services businesses longer than anyone else on the OSD LT, and has been a pivotal leader at critical milestones of [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Video | Channel: Video | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: Employees

There is a special Google logo on Google for Halloween today, the logo is a video of Google's Doodle team carving the Google logo out of huge pumpkins. One of the pumpkins 1,298 pounds, and many of the others are over 1,000 pounds. Here is the video of the Google logo in action: Here is a video of the Google Doodle team making the logo: Google is not the only one with an animated logo for Halloween. Both Bing and Yahoo have animated logos or themes: Yahoo: Bing: Ask.com: Dogpile: For more logos from the search industry, see my other post over he [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos | Microsoft: Bing | Yahoo: General

Ask.com has a long history in TV advertising; some of it has been entertaining and some of it controversial. But the IAC-owned search engine was on a TV hiatus of sorts during the past couple of years. Now, according to AdWeek, the company is running new TV ads in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The ads reportedly focus on Ask's more recent positioning as a Q&A engine: The 15-second commercials emphasize the company’s new focus on fact-based answers to questions posed in everyday language, showing people asking things like "Where can I watch TV online for free?" and "Does speed dating [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Ask: Promotions | Channel: Search

After more than a year in beta, Ask.com today opened the doors on its community-based question-and-answer product. It positions Ask as much less search-oriented, and much more Q&A based -- not unlike its original incarnation in the 1990s. The Q&A site had been available in beta to a limited number of users since last July (2010) when Ask began to transition from search to Q&A. As you'll see on the third screenshot below, Ask says it has more than 344,000 people already in the Q&A community. At the time of the initial announcement last summer, the Ask.com homepage still had a search bar, [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search | Features: Analysis | Top News

Ask.com the social search/Q&A engine is 15 years old. Founded in 1996 as Ask Jeeves by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen the company has launched a special social site to celebrate its birthday and review events of the past 15 years -- mylast15.com. Here's a brief recent history of Ask: July 1999: Ask Jeeves goes public March 2005: IAC buys Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion February 2006: Jeeves the Butler goes into retirement April 2006: Steve Berkowitz, head of Ask.com, leaves to join Microsoft. Jim Lazone named CEO of Ask June 2007: Lanzone launches innovative Ask 3D UI, which [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: Employees | Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search

Today is Mother's Day in the United States and many many other countries and for the special day, Google and the other search engines have special logos and themes up. The logos and themes are to honor our Mothers for all they have done for us. Below is a listing of the logos from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com and other search engines that have special logos up for Mother's Day. More Fun Google Logos: Google’s Royal Wedding Logo Your Guide To The Royal Wedding 2011, Social Media Style What Time Is The Royal Wedding? Google Tells You With Special [...]

Related Topics: AOL: General | Ask: General | Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos | Microsoft: Bing | Yahoo: General