Topic: Ask.com

PPC

Ask.com To Launch Contextual Advertising Product

Ask.com is launching a new sponsored listings contextual product and will go live the week of May 21st. The Ask contextual product will initially launch within IAC’s own network of sites including Match.com, Ticketmaster, Evite and Citysearch and will then expand to trusted third party publishers. Individual publishers will most likely have to wait until […]

New US Border Check Tool: Google

Via Boing Boing, LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US from The Tyee covers how Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar was denied entry into the United States after being pulled aside during a border crossing for a random check. One of those fancy explosive sniffing machines then get him stopped? Metal in his […]

Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American

  It’s official. Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American, or at least now ranks tops for that phrase at Google. It’s all come from the latest Google bombing campaign sparked off in part by Stephen himself. The backstory on this, plus the “I thought Google bombing didn’t work anymore” angle, all below. Jonah Stein […]

The Case Of The Missing White House Cached Page On Google

In my story about Google’s new content removal tools, I highlighted the fact that anyone can potentially wipe out the cached copy of a page, even if they aren’t the page’s author. To illustrate this, I was going to use as an example how the official George W. Bush page’s cached copy could get nixed. […]

QueryCAT – Search FAQs

QueryCat is a search engine that is designed to search frequently asked questions, and they claim to have the largest database of these, by using the Alexa web crawler. They have apparently indexed over 2 million questions and answers (though this information isn’t on the website) which is a fair number. I tried lots of […]

SEO

Goodbye Teoma Algorithm, Hello Edison, Says Ask.com

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, has confirmed with me that Ask.com is working on Edison. Edison is the code name behind merging of Ask.com’s two different search technologies they own, Teoma and Direct Hit. The name comes from inventor Thomas Edison, who worked out of New Jersey where’s Ask’s Teoma technology came from and where […]

Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery

Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file […]

George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google

Remember how Google introduced a link bomb fix in January that, among other things, finally got US President George W. Bush out of first page of results for searches on miserable failure and failure at Google? Bush is back, at least for failure, and the White House has only itself to blame. Someone reading our […]

SEO

WSJ Covers Ask.com’s “Information Revolution” Ad Campaign

Ask.Com’s ‘Revolt’ Risks Costly Clicks from the Wall Street Journal weighs in on the Ask.com guerrilla marketing campaign we covered last month, especially focusing on the negative comments that have appeared on the associated web site. The article also highlighting the television commercials now airing. I’ve seen these myself on TV here, and a video […]

Google My Maps: Mashups For The Masses

Google has just launched “My Maps,” an impressively simple tool within Google Maps that allows users to create personal “mashups” and save or share those with friends or the world at large. A range of formatting options enables the maps to be highly customized and include images or video. Maps can be created “manually” by […]

SEO

Ask Ramps Up The Mystery Ads

First in the UK, Ask rolled out a guerilla marketing campaign aimed at sparking an "information revolution" to choose Ask over Google. Now a different yet still mysterious campaign is underway in the US by Ask. Valleywag reports about billboards on Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose saying "The Algorithm Killed Jeeves" [Ask’s […]

SEO

eTools.ch: A “Swiss Army” Meta Search Engine

I’m generally not a big fan of meta search technologies—I prefer to go directly to the search service I feel will likely give me the best response for any given query, rather than sifting through the aggregated results from several engines. But recently, developer Stephan Schmid invited me to kick the tires on his Switzerland-based […]

comScore: Slight Google Rise, Status Quo With Rest In February 2007

Now having covered the latest search popularity figures from Hitwise and Nielsen//NetRatings, it’s time to look at those out from comScore. It’s mostly the same old news — Google up a bit, everyone else holding steady. Here are the figures, which cover the percentage of home, work and university searches done in the US for […]

SEO

Hitwise: Slight Google Rise In February 2007

Search popularity stats for last month are coming out once again, and I’m diving in with the latest figures from Hitwise. They show Google had a slight rise over the previous month, mainly at the loss of Microsoft Live. The month-to-month figures are below, along with the long term trend for all the major players. […]

SEO

Searcharazzi: Esther Dyson to Keynote Search Insider Summit

alt=”Searcharazzi – A Column From Search Engine Land” align=”left” hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″ height=”100″> Road warriors know that tradeshow season is on. With SXSW just wrapped up, the herd continues west coast for the OMMA Hollywood next week followed by iMedia Breakthrough in Nevada. It will be back east for SES New York, the ACCM in […]

SEO

Gary Price of Ask.com & ResourceShelf Interviewed

Q&A With Ask.com’s Gary Price from Search Engine Watch has an interview with one of the people I look up to most in this industry. As you may remember I came in to help fill a void at Search Engine Watch after Gary left to join Ask.com. Gary is now the director of online information […]

SEO

Ask On Ad Campaign: Fun Way To Wake The “Sleep Searchers”

I wrote earlier about Ask’s guerrilla marketing campaign now underway to raise awareness of the search engine in the UK. I’ve now talked with Ask CEO Jim Lanzone, who explained more about how the campaign is designed to unfold. He said it’s all meant in good fun, not to be negative about Google, but rather […]

Ask’s Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Google

Via Valleywag, Ask.com appears to be running a guerrilla marketing campaign in the UK designed to seem like a grassroots effort against a Google monopoly in search. The picture above, taken by Ben Werdmuller, shows one of the campaign’s ads on the London Underground. The ad directs you to the Information Revolution site, on a […]

Microsoft’s “Third Era” Of Search Begins With Departure Of Search Chief Christopher Payne

Microsoft’s top search executive leaving company from the Seattle PI covers Microsoft’s Christopher Payne reportedly leaving the company. The AP also reports similar news from its sources. Payne took over search efforts at Microsoft back in 2003. He oversaw what I’d call Microsoft’s "second era" of search, that of developing a crawler-based search engine to […]

SEO

Ask City’s Shape Search Tool For Local Search Results

The Ask.com Blog announced a neat new feature that enables you to literally shape your own local search results. You can go to Ask City, locate a location, draw a circle or square in a certain location and then search specifically within that location. Below is a screen cast I put up to explain it […]

SEO

Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More

Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag — one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted “Using the robots meta tag,” providing some clarity from […]

PPC

Pandia Offers Custom Search For Search Information

Pandia is offering a free custom search called the Search Engine Detective, a meta search engine which lets you do specialized searches for anything search engine related. Search Engine Detective give you two options: “All the best sites about search engines” searches a wide variety of sites and blogs on search engine optimization and the […]