Financial analysts are releasing May comScore search market share data to their clients, which means we're getting an early look at what the metrics firm will be generally exposing in the next 24 hours. Here are the numbers -- comparing April and May of 2013 as well as May 2012: Google: 66.7 percent (May) vs. 66.5 percent (April) vs. 66.7 percent (May 2012) Bing: 17.4 percent (May) vs. 17.3 percent (April) vs. 15.4 percent (May 2012) Yahoo: 11.9 percent (May) vs. 12 percent (April) vs. 13.4 percent (May 2012) Ask: Google: 2.7 percent (May) vs. 2.7 percent (April) vs. 3 percent ( [...]

Related Topics: AOL | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Industry | Google | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior

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 Marketing | 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 Marketing | 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

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 Marketing

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

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

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 Marketing | Search & Society: General | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | Stats: Search Behavior

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 Marketing | 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 Marketing

IAC, the parent of Ask.com, the Daily Beast and Citysearch, today announced it has amended and extended its distribution agreement with Google through March 31, 2016. The deal, which involves the distribution of AdWords ads and other search-related services to IAC sites, was originally scheduled to expire at the end of 2012. Though IAC didn't get into specific details about what terms changed, the company says the new agreement is "comparable" to the previous agreement, when taken as a whole. Back in November, Ask.com gave up web search to concentrate on Q&A search, and was said to be [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Sponsored Listings | Ask: Web Search | Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

As Matt posted earlier this evening Ask is in beta on a new approach to search, or perhaps more accurately: a return to an earlier approach but with greater experience and sophistication. The IAC-owned company is returning, conceptually, to its origins as a question & answer engine, when human editors were involved. This has been in the works since last year when Ask was calling it "social search." The company is making a serious bet that "Q&A" can be a differentiator for Ask and provide new appeal for the engine, which has seen flat-to-modestly-declining traffic over the past two y [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Ask 3D | Ask: General | Ask: Mobile | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Mobile | Top News

As we (and others) hinted a couple weeks ago, Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service that it was back in the site's heyday. NOTE: SEE OUR FOLLOW-UP PIECE, Ask Comes Full Circle With "Q&A" Offering The new Ask.com homepage represents a pretty dramatic change. Search is still front and center, but in order to focus on the Q&A aspect, Ask says all users will now see the "Question of the Day" feature; a section of "Popular Questions" is also featured prominently on the home page. The look-and-feel changes are [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Ask.com was arguably the original Q&A engine. Now the site is seeking to introduce a new product, which leverages both its search assets and the community. We were approached but we've yet to formally speak to someone from IAC about the forthcoming launch. However, Silicon Alley Insider today exposes the PR email outlining the plan: On July 29th, Ask will announce a brand new product aimed at delivering the best answers to people’s questions through a unique hybrid approach (think: a little bit search, a little bit social) that is not available on the Web today. As you know, the se [...]

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

With Google owning the search landscape, the best other search engines can hope for these days is to be a searcher's second-favorite option -- the place we go when Google doesn't help us find what we're looking for. According to a new report from Chitika, Google users go to Yahoo and even Ask.com much more often than Bing. Chitika studied the search behavior of more than 39,000 users visiting sites across its online ad network -- users who searched for the same exact word/phrase in a short period of time before hitting one of Chitika's sites. Users who first searched at Google chose [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News | Yahoo: Search

Sean Carlos wrote that Teoma.com is now back in action. Teoma was acquired by Ask Jeeves back in 2001 and ultimately became the search technology behind Ask's search results. Teoma was founded by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis from Rutgers and Professor Tao Yang from UCSB helped with the technology, known as Subject-Specific Popularity. Ask.com renamed Subject-Specific Popularity to ExpertRank later on. Eventually, Teoma went away but sometime last month, Teoma returned. Sean Carlos asked IAC, the parent company of Ask.com and Teoma, why the return and they told him they wanted to giv [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Consumer

AOL's CEO: Google To Get 1st Shot At New Search Deal from the Wall Street Journal reports AOL's CEO, Tim Armstrong saying that Google will get "first dibs" at a search deal. Armstrong said this at Citi's annual entertainment, media and telecommunications conference today. This was prompted by a question about possibly using Microsoft Bing as a search partner at the end of this year, when the Google deal expires. Armstrong added that a new search deal, under the new independent AOL, will be financially good for them. He specifically said they "may trade search dollars for more display dol [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Industry | Google: Business Issues | Google: Partnerships

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." Anoth [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: General | Ask: Other | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search Marketing

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 -- whi [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Industry

The Six Revisions blog complied an excellent list of the classic search engines, some dating back to the 1990s. His list includes screen shots of both the old and current (if available) versions of HotBot, Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Yahoo, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN Search, Bing, AOL Search, Infoseek, Go.com, Netscape, MetaCrawler, and All The Web. Scrolling down the list and looking at some of those old screen shots bring back fun memories. Of course, there are many search engines missing, too many to list there or even here. But looking at the old screen capt [...]

Related Topics: AOL: Search Marketplace | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search Marketing | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Live Search | Search Engines: Lycos | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Yahoo: Search