Diller Says He’s Willing To Sell Ask.com
Oct 27, 2009 at 7:43pm ET by Matt McGee
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 [...]
Filed in: Ask: Business Issues, Ask: Web Search
A Look Back At The Old Search Engines
Sep 14, 2009 at 9:31am ET by Barry Schwartz
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 [...]
Filed in: AOL: Search Marketplace, Ask: Web Search, Google: Web Search, Microsoft: Bing, Microsoft: Live Search, Search Engines: Lycos, Search Engines: Other Search Engines, Yahoo: Search
Ask.com Expands AnswerFarm Q&A Database
Jun 17, 2009 at 1:48pm ET by Matt McGee
Continuing its move from being a traditional search engine to an "answer engine," Ask today has announced that its "AnswerFarm" database has tripled in size, from 100 million Q&A pairs to 300 million.
Ask says they've also improved the quality of the Q&A database content:
"Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance enable us to determine when we have multiple questions that all semantically mean the same thing, so we can aggregate those Q&A pairs, filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats, and thus find the most relevant [...]
Filed in: Ask: Web Search, Search Engines: Answer Search Engines
Russian Roulette: McAfee Details Web’s Riskiest Search Terms
Jun 9, 2009 at 3:05pm ET by Matt McGee
Somewhere online right now there's a music fan who's big on free downloads, likes Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" but doesn't know the lyrics, is looking for free ringtones, uses MySpace, likes to play solitaire and wants the latest game cheats. Like many of us, s/he uses a search engine to find all of these things.
This person may as well be playing Russian roulette.
In a recent report (PDF), online security company McAfee says those are some of the most dangerous search terms on the web.
That's just a sample of the report's list of the 50 riskiest search terms in the U.S. "Maximum R [...]
Filed in: Ask: Web Search, Google: Security, Google: Web Search, Microsoft: Bing, SEO: Spamming, Stats: General, Top News, Yahoo: Search
Ask.com & Symantec Partner To Detect Malicious Sites
Feb 3, 2009 at 12:01am ET by Chris Sherman
Ask.com has partnered with Symantec to include a new "Safe Search" feature into the Norton 360 security suite, integrated into the Norton toolbar that is part of the suite. When a search is run from the toolbar, results are safety-rated by Symantec using a color-coded icon, to flag sites or sections of sites that may be malicious or harmful. Mousing over a rating will open a popup window offering more details about the Safe Search rating.
The toolbar works on both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and is set by default to not display "red" or potentially malicious web site in search results. [...]
Filed in: Ask: Web Search, Search Features: Safety
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