If you’re the number four search engine in a market that is looking like it’s going to be about two (maybe three) players in the long run, what do you do? If you’re Barry Diller and running the parent company of Ask, the search engine in question, you’re potentially looking at selling, with Microsoft as a logical buyer. That’s all speculation at this point, however.

In the meantime, Ask is doing and trying a lot of things to keep users and redefine its role in this new, contracting or consolidating search landscape. Most recently it made a major push into shopping with “deals search.” Another major initiative to soon gain more momentum and visibility is something of a return to Ask’s roots as a “Q&A” engine. (The picture immediately below is circa 2001.)

Ask, which has been highlighting “answers” for some time, is going to move more directly into social search or real-time Q&A.

Ask President Doug Leeds told me the other day that Ask still gets a huge number of queries formulated as questions. In recognition of that and the more recent rise of social and “real time” search, Ask will begin to enlist its community directly in answering questions and use a number of sophisticated algorithms around question routing and identifying trustworthy and authoritative answers and people.

If well executed it could be an effective strategy for the company (including in mobile), which despite many years of innovative efforts under former CEO Jim Lanzone was not really able to grow its share beyond 4 percent of overall traffic.

Q&A services have been around for quite some time, while “social search” and “real time search” are newer phenomena. We could identify a range of companies that are in one way or another enlisting humans to answer queries or questions. Beyond Yahoo Answers, Mahalo and others like them, there are Aardvark, kgb, ChaCha, not to mention Facebook and Twitter, that fall into these categories to varying degrees. And Google recently introduced “social search” seeking to bring humans more directly into search results.

Leeds said to me that almost nobody in the segment today is going to be able to do what Ask can do with social search/Q&A “at scale.” I think that the strategy makes a great deal sense for Ask. Whether it people ultimately use it will depend entirely on execution.

Barry Diller, CEO of IAC — the parent company of Ask.com — said today that he’s willing to sell the struggling, fourth-place search engine. His comments came during a conference call with investors after IAC reported its 3rd quarter earnings.

“We’ve been asked a lot whether we’re open to consolidating transactions in the area of search. The answer is yes,” Diller said. “And, it is unlikely that we would be the consolidator.” Diller also called the future of Ask.com “speculative” during today’s call, citing the “fierce” competition in search.

IAC’s media and advertising business — which includes Ask.com — suffered an 11 percent drop in revenues in Q3. And according to the latest comScore survey, Ask.com is a distant fourth in the search race with just 3.9% market share. It’s actually moved away from being a true search engine recently, and returned to its roots with the expansion of AnswerFarm, a Q&A database that was launched one year ago.

Who would want a struggling search engine? Silicon Alley Insider thinks Microsoft could be the only suitor.

There’s more Ask.com discussion on Techmeme.

Ten days ago, we reported that Antonio Gulli left Ask.com after 4 years heading up their technology team in the European R&D center. Gulli announced his new plans are to continue in search, but switch ships and work for Microsoft Bing.

Gulli said he will be “leading all the engineering development for UX and verticals in Europe,” focusing on Microsoft Bing’s search technology and user interface. He will be working at Microsoft’s London site of STC Europe nearby Carnaby Street.

What I found most interesting about his announcement post was that he, in not so many words, explained that he now has the resources needed to make a difference in search. The way I read it was that he felt that at Ask.com, he didn’t have enough resources to accomplish his goals. Gulli said that at Microsoft “you get the resources to experiment with it.”"Search is all about continuous improvements and evolutions, isn’t it?” Gulli added.

Congrats on the new job Antonio, it seems like you will be happy at Microsoft.

I was walking through the expo hall, which I rarely do, and I spotted at the Ask.com booth this sign.

You read that? “My company just gave up on search. Where do I work now” and then the URL at the bottom. That is Ask.com being funny and then trying to pick up Yahoo Search employees. I am also being told that they are giving away bars of chocolate that say the same line.

Yea, Yahoo did give up on search but I also personally believe Ask.com has also given up on search.

Ask.com’s parent company reported second quarter earnings, which showed an overall decline in revenue of 4% for the overall company, but dipped 10% in the media and advertising category, the category Ask.com fits into.

IAC said revenue per query declined because of an “improved experience on Ask.com following its relaunch in October.” The relaunch has lead to “fewer clicks by consumers to find what they are looking for, as well as a decrease in cost per click.”

Here are the key numbers from the earnings release:

• Overall Revenues at $340 million down 4% from a year ago, at $354.2M
• Media & Advertising Revenues at $168.6M down 10% from a year ago, at $186.3M

Full details can be found in the IAC release.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ask.com CEO Jim Safka is leaving the company. He will become the head of Chegg, Inc., which rents textbooks to students online. The decision to leave is apparently Safka’s, for personal reasons. Longtime IAC executive Scott Garell will take over as “President of Ask Networks.”

In its most recent earnings report, IAC’s “media & advertising” business (which reflects search revenues) was off 22 percent compared with the same period a year ago. Ask’s market share, as the WSJ article points out, has remained largely flat during Safka’s time at the helm, with just under a 4 percent share of the search market in the US. However, in an email to Danny, Safka described a number of achievements, including growing traction for Ask’s vertical strategy and success with the return of Jeeves the butler in the UK.

In early January, 2008 Safka replaced then Ask CEO Jim Lanzone, who had presided over the innovative “Ask 3D” relaunch. Lanzone became CEO of Ask in April, 2006 himself replacing Steve Berkowitz who went to Microsoft. (Berkowitz is currently CEO at Move.com.)

In the on again off again debate about whether Ask remains serious about search, a new blog post suggests that Ask is making a bid to improve its search index and efficiency, having completed a move to a new datacenter:

Our engineers were going to have to spend more time on improving efficiency, and less time on new feature development. So we’ve been in the planning stages for moving to new datacenter spaces since 2006, and we’ve executed the move of thousands of systems over the past several months . . .

We’re excited about our new infrastructure position because it supports new and innovative core search technology initiatives, and allows us to continually improve the vital basics such as speed, freshness and relevancy . . .

The idea is improved performance both for site owners/publishers and for end users.

Ah, Ask.com. Since I wrote their obituary in March, not much has got me thinking they’ll make a comeback. Sure, there was the gimmick of kind of bringing back Jeeves himself. But the spate of “hotels.ask.com” ads I see them running on Google makes me think they’re dropping further from being a search engine and more into a search arbitrage play.

Take a look at this search for new hampshire hotels:

See the ad? It promises that you can “Book here & Save A Massive 50%” with the site listed being New-Hampshire.Hotels.Ask.com.

Click on the ad, and you get this:

Rather than taking you to a place where you can really book a hotel room (which the ad promises) and rather than really offering up to 50% off (no prices are offered at all, right?), you simply get search results from Ask. Five paid listings at the top, 10 unpaid listings sandwiched between, then the same five listings you saw at the top of the page repeated. Why not five new ads at the bottom? As a Google partner, I assume Ask can tell which ads are willing to pay the most per click and keeps the page focused only around these possible big money earners.

Ads from Google, on Ask? Yes, Ask has long carried Google’s ads. Every one of those ads carries a Google tracking code, so they certainly don’t seem to be those that Ask sells through its own program.

So what’s the point of Ask running these ads? Search engine have long run ads on other search engines to generate search traffic. For example, if I search for cashback, I get this ad from Microsoft touting its Live Search Cashback service:

Or if I search for apples, I get this from Live:

That takes you to these image search results at Live for pictures of apples.

What Ask is doing is a different thing entirely. Rather than promoting its own product (as with the Cashback example), or drumming up some incremental searches for its site (as with the apples example, or by saying something like “New Hampshire Hotels? Try Ask.com For Better Results”), Ask is using specific text to make you think you can conduct and conclude a purchase at their web site, when you cannot. Instead, what you are far more likely to do is click on a Google ad that Ask carries, earning Ask money (and almost certainly more money than they paid to get your click from Google).

It’s not just New Hampshire Hotels that are being targeted. Ask has ads going after a variety of locations, as this Google search reveals, including:

• germany.hotels.ask.com
• maine.hotels.ask.com
• BellGardens-CA.Hotels.Ask.com
• Calistoga-CA.Hotels.Ask.com
• Oregon.Hotels.Ask.com

Those matches are all pages that have Ask ads contextually placed across the web through Google’s AdSense program.

I’m surprised Google’s allowing these ads. For one thing, they’ve been cracking down on arbitrage for well over a year, in particular introducing new guidelines that specifically name “travel aggregator” sites in September 2007. What Ask’s doing seems to be making it a travel aggregator site to me. Certainly someone clicking from a Google ad to another page filled with the exact same ads they’d seen before isn’t a unique or useful user experience.

The ad copy, which promises the ability to book and save, seems to go against the “overarching rule” Google has that ads should:

• Clearly and accurately represent your site.
• Emphasize the unique benefits of your product or service.

I don’t know where the 50% off figure comes from used in the ad. Google’s policy about discounts is that they should be “accurately displayed on your website within 1-2 clicks of your ad’s landing page. Nothing on the  “landing page” of Ask’s search results leads one click away to an explanation of the discount that was in the ad.

While I’m surprised Google’s allowing the ads, I’m not surprised Ask is running them. It’s just a further sign to me that the future of Ask isn’t about building an audience but instead earning as much off the remaining traffic it has left.

Postscript: Ask emailed me this:

We wanted you to know that this was an isolated incident that was incorrectly managed by one of our SEM agencies.  We’ve already taken proactive steps to eliminate it and to ensure that this doesn’t occur again. Our policy is to have our ad creative provide a clear and accurate description of the search results that are generated for each and every query.

Google recently came under fire for not providing a link to its privacy policy right from its home page, as Yahoo and Microsoft do. Ask.com, apparently hoping to ride the issue to some consumer gains, has emailed us that it now proudly sports a privacy link on its home page, along with some new privacy smart answers.

C’mon Google, just add the link — seven letters, PRIVACY, won’t take up much space. And it will at least stop others from riding you on the issue this way, even if practically no one will click on the link.

More from the Ask email, below:

An Open Letter to the Web Community and our Users:

Several weeks ago, a group of privacy advocates contacted a major company in the search marketplace, requesting some key changes to its website to make weblinks to its privacy policy more accessible and conspicuous. This included placing a “Privacy” link directly on the homepage that would, in one click, serve up the company’s privacy policy to the user.

In their June 3rd letter requesting the change, the privacy groups stated that such a move represents “…a commitment by a commercial website to inform users about the company’s privacy practices.”

Ask.com agrees.

At Ask, we take our commitment to user privacy and data protection very seriously. We’ve demonstrated this not just through words, but through deeds and actions. We were the first major search company to announce that we would be placing privacy tools directly in the hands of our users, as we said we would do in July 2007. Then, we did it: we launched AskEraser in December 2007. Ask remains the only major search company to develop and deploy a privacy protection tool that that empowers web users to make decisions as to data retention by Ask. The AskEraser tool is right there on our homepage, a one-step mechanism to deleting a users’ search data from Ask.com servers.

Now, we’re going several steps further.

As of today, Ask.com has added a direct link to our privacy policy via a “Privacy” link prominently placed right on our homepage. It is only one of four non-search related weblinks on our homepage. We’ve also made sure that the “Privacy” link appears on the landing pages across most of Ask’s verticals as well, which cover almost all of Ask’s search traffic.

In addition to this important and timely step, Ask has also added a conspicuous link to our privacy policy right on our Ask “About” page, which is one click off our homepage.

At the same time, we realized we can – and should – do more to inform our users about the importance of privacy on Ask, and in general on the web. And we have. We are developing and finalizing two separate Ask “Smart Answer” search results pages, so when a user goes to Ask.com and types in “Ask Privacy” or “Privacy” in the search box, they will get served up a specially designed, robust, and comprehensive results page that is a one-stop shop of answers on both Ask’s privacy policies and actions (including AskEraser), as well as on privacy in general.

No one required that we take any of these steps. We took a look at our webpages, and realized we could make some key improvements when it came to privacy links on our service. It’s simply the right thing to do for the information and awareness of our users.

We strongly encourage others in the search marketplace and online industry to do the same.

By the way, as a result of the change, Ask.com in the UK no longer sports the Ask.com US link necessary to get to its US site after it directs you to the UK one. Yes, being in the UK, I find that annoying.

Click fraud lawsuit targets IAC’s Citysearch from News.com reports the law firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner is targeting IAC’s Citysearch.com for allegedly “defrauding its advertising customers of millions of dollars” by “turning a blind eye to click fraud” and actually “encouraging” the click fraud.

This Los Angeles-based law firm has won suits against Google and Yahoo in the past on click fraud charges. In addition, last month it filed a new suit (Google Sued For Undesired AdSense Inclusion) against Google.

In this case, the plaintiff is Tom Lambotte, who claimed he started a Citysearch ad account in 2007. After not seeing much click activity, he decided to cancel his account. During the long cancellation process, he noticed an increase in the number of clicks on his ads. Lambotte hired Kabateck to represent them in this click fraud case.

Kabateck issued a statement:

Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers of millions of dollars by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but in fact encouraging it as well.