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.

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 captures of Google, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista reminds me of the simpler days in search.

Which was your favorite old search engine?

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 answers.”

Here’s what the Q&A pairs look like in Ask’s search results:

Ask formally rolled out the Q&A pairs from its AnswerFarm database back in October 2008.

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 Risk” describes the percentage of pages on a single search results page that were dangerous; i.e., on a search for “lyrics,” there was one search results page on which 50% of the ranked pages were risky. “Average Risk” is the overall risk from all five pages of search results for each term.

McAfee analyzed the first five search results pages of 2,600 popular keywords across five search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL, and Ask. They analyzed both organic and paid listings and counted the number of links that led to pages that McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool flagged as dangerous. The study ultimately reviewed more than 413,000 unique URLs.

McAfee’s study also found that certain categories of keywords were more riskier than others. Searches related to “lyrics” and “free” had both the highest average risk and highest maximum risk.

It should be no surprise that McAfee also found scammers like to look at popular trends when choosing what keywords to target. Here’s a chart showing some of the riskiest terms related to the economic crisis:

The report also has charts detailing the most dangerous search terms in other U.S categories, as well as several other countries including Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and others. Here’s the PDF download link (2.2mb) if you’re interested in more details.

To some degree, the McAfee report calls into question how well the search engines themselves do at notifying users of risky sites. Yahoo uses McAfee’s SearchScan, Ask uses Symantec, while Live Search Bing and Google have their own malware detection tools. But, on a purely anecdotal level, if you search for the terms listed in the McAfee report, Google, Yahoo, and Bing show very few warnings in the first five pages of results.

(found via Lifehacker)

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. There are options allowing you to tune the settings to meet your own comfort level when viewing search results.

The announcement is another part of Ask’s strategic focus of working with partners, in an effort to increase its market share among its target audience of families and kids. Danny wrote about this new focus a few weeks ago in Ask.com Partners With NASCAR, Says “Super Verticals” Will Put It Back In Search Race. The idea is that by leveraging the strength of its partnerships, Ask will be able to successfully compete with Google et al without necessarily doing battle directly with the major search engines.

Ask can use the help in acquiring new traffic. According to comScore, Ask’s share of the search market in the fourth quarter of 2008 declined to 4.0%, down from 4.4% in the third quarter of the year. Andrew Moers, president of the Ask partner network, declined to discuss specific traffic share the company hopes to gain, but said “It’s a big win for the Ask partner network. Symantec ships tens of millions of pieces of software per year, so it’s a very meaningful relationship.”

Google led the way in displaying malware warnings in search results when it began issuing warnings about potentially dangerous sites in February 2007. No toolbar is required to view these warnings—they show up automatically on a Google search result page when malicious sites are detected. Over the past weekend, Google’s system went haywire, briefly labeling all search results as malware.

Yahoo has had a partnership with McAfee since May of last year with SearchScan, which uses McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology to flag URLs it deems “risky” in the search results. And Microsoft added malware warnings to Live Search results in December 2008.

The new Safe Search toolbar is part of the Norton 360 security suite, version 3.0, and will be available by download. The final version of the security suite will be released by the end of the quarter, according to Moers.

Ask.com has released version 11 of their new search engine today. The new version somewhat goes back to the Ask Jeeves approach, focusing on providing structured search results, mostly in the form of answers.

Techmeme has coverage of the news item, with the main articles currently from the NY Times and News.com.

We expected this was coming and now it has. Ask.com is focusing more on structured sources of content to formulate the search results. Jim Safka told the NY Times that this makes the search engine faster, in fact, they estimate it is now 30 percent faster than the previous version. The structured results seem to come from many of their content syndication deals and they have added an answers section that pulls from sources like Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers. Ask.com calls this, “Q&A pairs.”

Ask 11 drops the third panel from Ask 3D to provide what they call an easier to read and use interface.

Technologizer documents many of the marketing campaigns Ask has gone through over the years. It makes for a good read.

Overall, like I said, we expected this to come. After seeing it, I personally still do not consider Ask.com to be a core search engine and thus do not consider them to be in the race with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. In fact, I find it interesting that Ask.com is bring back the Jeeves approach, which failed back then – but they hope will work now.

A few days ago, Ask.com relaunched Ask Kids, their search flavored for children. The Ask.com blog just wrote about the launch last night.

Ask.com said the Ask Kids site was “built from the ground-up, with our own search technology.” It seems like Ask.com added a “very strict” list of which sites are allowed in the Ask Kids index and which are not allowed. They claim it is the “most comprehensive, kid-friendly search available today.”

The search result layout is pretty much the same, with a three-pane view, but it does add a more kid friendly design to it. The feature I like the best is what I call, the kids place mat, which allows you to draw and scribble on the home page of Ask Kids. Here is my master piece:

Ask also added what they call the Schoolhouse, which provides learning resources, shortcut links, and reference sites for particular school subjects.

The Olympics are now officially under way. One of the unofficial competitions is among the search engines and companion sites to offer scores, updates and coverage of the games. Below is a roundup of where you can keep track of the medal count and watch your favorite action online.

Google:

Google has an Olympics homepage that showcases a range of services and tools to keep track of events, including an iGoogle gadget. Depending on what country you’re in, there are different YouTube channels. And there’s a mobile site.

Google is also offering special OneBox results for individual Olympic events. Yahoo:

Yahoo has a medal count shortcut, extensive coverage on Yahoo Sports and a dedicated mobile site.

Yahoo is also offering Olympics video clips.

Microsoft Live Search:

Microsoft is supplying Olympic updates and medal counts through a partnership with NBC. The links displayed in blended search results click through to the NBC Olympics site.

Truveo/AOL:

Truveo has extensive video coverage of the Olympics from multiple partners and sources across the internet.

Ask:

Ask offers special smart search results, pull-downs (by sport) and refinements.

In the non-search engine category, ESPN and NBC have extensive coverage on their sites. There’s also a fair amount of video on the NBC site. Reuters has some in-depth coverage as well.

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.