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.

If you visit Google.com today, you will see a special logo for Veterans Day. The logo is less complex when compared to last years, where Google had to fix their Veterans Day logo. Last year, Google placed hats on top of each letter on the Google logo, the hats included Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. But they forgot one, the U.S. Coast Guard, which they added later.

Google also has a logo on Google.co.uk for Remembrance Day:

Bing has a Veterans Day Theme:

Yahoo typically skips adding a special logo for today, which is what they have done today. But you can see more logos, from Ask.com, AOL and others at the Search Engine Roundtable.

There’s a report from Reuters this morning that Microsoft and Yahoo are considering expanding the scope of their search deal “outside the United States”:

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday the company could look to extend its search engine partnership with Yahoo outside the United States, if it gets regulatory approval.

Wasn’t that already the intention? I thought it was a global deal already. European regulators wouldn’t be considering it if it didn’t apply to their markets; they wouldn’t have jurisdiction. So I guess I’m a bit confused I guess.

Regardless, if either the EU or US Department of Justice disapproves the deal it will kill the whole thing globally in all likelihood. I would expect approval although it’s also possible that limitations and conditions could be attached by regulators.

Reportedly Barry Diller, CEO of IAC Corp., wants to sell Ask — perhaps feeling he’s ridden the wave as far as he can (with some disappointment). If so, the most likely buyer would be Microsoft according to widespread speculation. It would allow Microsoft to grab some incremental but meaningful share of the market. The question would be at what price?

Timing is huge here. If Ying/MicroHoo were to gain approval from regulators, or the appearance of forthcoming approval were strong, the value of Ask to Microsoft is less than if the Yahoo deal were not to go through. In the latter case Diller could exact a higher price than in the former. There could be other buyers out there for Ask (e.g., News Corp., Comcast?) but Microsoft is the one with more to gain from adding scale.

According to comScore, Ask maintains a small but meaningful core following:

That respresents 718 million queries in September, according to the metrics firm. However iCrossing recently said it has seen referrals to its clients’ sites from Ask drop “precipitously.”

Postscript: The following was a clarification that I received in email from a Microsoft spokesperson:

[T]he Microsoft-Yahoo! agreement does apply outside the United States. As it’s written, it must be approved by regulators in the U.S. and Europe in order to go into effect. As soon as those regulators give approval, the agreement goes into effect worldwide, although implementation in a specific country is postponed if regulatory approval is required there and it is not yet obtained. But that will not postpone implementation in other places.

Today is Halloween and the search engines have logos up for the special day. Before I post the logos, here are some posts from others in the community on Halloween.

Matt Cutts of Google had a holy costume. Google Blogoscoped noticed Google added trick or treat to their robots.txt file. Bing has a special visual search edition for today. Bruce Clay’s team dressed up and PPC Heros added some funk. Finally, the logos you see below is reposted from the Search Engine Roundtable.

Google has four Doodles:

Yahoo (Flash):

AOL (Flash):

YouTube:

Bing:

Ask.com:

Dogpile:

BruceClay’s design:

Search Engine Roundtable:

For the past logos, see 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004 logos.

Online coupons have been around for many years, at least a decade. Despite this no publisher or site has arisen to yet win the space. There’s no Facebook of coupons, no Twitter of coupons and, dare I say it, no Google of coupons. Google itself would seem to have missed or mishandled the opportunity with its peek-a-boo approach to local coupons.

Yet coupons and deals have become progressively hotter during the recession. And now there are a growing number of sites online and in mobile that promise access to offers and savings. Sensing a differentiating opportunity, Ask is today launching a deals vertical (”Ask Deals“) within search that seeks to be that comprehensive source of coupons and offers from a wide range of sources.

Ask is largely crawling for the data and said the following in its press release about the scope of Deals at launch:

Ask Deals, its proprietary database of more than 1 million high-quality savings offers from national and local merchants across hundreds of product categories.

Ask Deals scours the Web for all the deals available online – from savings on ‘skinny jeans’ to restaurant coupons – and organizes the best money-saving offers front and center on the results page, eliminating the need for consumers to search multiple sites or multiple coupon sites or search engine links to find their answer. The Ask Deals database is continuously refreshed and editorially refined, giving consumers the most up-to-date and highest-quality savings offers every time they search on Ask.

Each of the major search engines now plays to some degree in the deals and coupons space. Yahoo has recently made a bigger push, while Google has seemingly neglected the coupon opportunity.

Microsoft offers an excellent travel vertical in Bing Travel (with price predictions and alerts) and provides cash back within shopping. The company also acquired the assets of local coupon platform Zixxo some time ago. And AOL, for its part, has one of the most interesting of the various deal/coupon initiatives in the little-known Shortcuts, which ties online CPG and grocery coupons to offline loyalty cards.

If you go into the iTunes app store you’ll find something like 30 apps that respond to the query “coupons.” Clearly this is an area that is growing and will be perennially popular.

To rise above the increasing number of sites and corresponding noise, Ask is betting on comprehensiveness, based on its ability to crawl the Internet and deliver a more effective and efficient search-driven user experience. I wasn’t able to try it out extensively before launch but my initial impressions are largely positive.

Happy Labor Day Search Engine Land readers! Due to the U.S. holiday, we will likely have limited coverage here today. Go out and enjoy the unofficial last day of summer! If you are stuck at work, like me, here are some logos from the search industry to hopefully brighten your day. Oh, yea – Google and Yahoo never have Labor Day logos.

Bing:

Ask.com:

DogPile:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable:

We wanted to wish all the fathers out there a happy Father’s Day from all of us at Search Engine Land. To celebrate, below is a collection of some of the logos from Google and the rest of the industry. Happy Father’s Day!

Google:

Yahoo:

AOL:

DogPile:

Bing:

Ask.com:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable:

Today is Memorial Day, so please expect lighter then normal coverage here. I have posted the various logos from the search engines for the special day. The big shocker in today’s logo roundup for Memorial Day is Google posting a little yellow ribbon on their home page. Historically, Google has never posted a ‘Doodle’ for the day, and today is no different, but they did place a little yellow ribbon. Below is a screen shot of the Google home page for today, plus the various logos from the other search engines for the special day.

Google:

Yahoo (animated):

AOL (animated):

DogPile:

Live.com:

Ask.com:

Search Engine Roundtable:

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.)

The Search Engine Land team would like to wish you a Happy Mother’s Day today. As tradition, I like to post the various logos from the search industry, to help celebrate the day. Here are the Mother’s Day logos. Google:

Yahoo (animated):

AOL (animated):

Live.com:

Ask.com:

Google Maps changed the Street Views guy to a mom and son:

Search Engine Roundtable: