InfoSpace is best known for its ownership of the search engine Dogpile.  And given that Dogpile is (at least in some circles) valued more for its holiday graphics than its search abilities, we agree that a few changes are needed.  It’s a bit sad to see more people lose their jobs, though.

InfoSpace claims the layoffs, along with other cost-cutting measures, should save around $8 million.  Rafat Ali notes, "Also, the company has appointed Bruce Allenbaugh to the new position of Chief Marketing Officer.  Among other things, Allenbaugh served as VP-marketing for Avenue A (now aQuantive)."

So we’ll see what these changes accomplish.  For the time being, the market seems unimpressed – InfoSpace’s stock is down 17 cents from its opening price.  Yet, in one more good news/bad news sort of scenario, the Nasdaq is also down, so the drop may have been hard to avoid.

The deal was done for $225 million in cash and will include all of InfoSpace’s online directory business.

Now, here’s an interesting twist. The Triangle Business Journal–yes we do have a tech industry in North Carolina folks–suggests that InfoSpace is also set to sell its entire mobile division to Durham-based Motricity.

Motricity just raised $175M and the TBJ’s sources say the deal is “expected soon.”

But, something is not gelling here…

By selling its mobile business, InfoSpace could focus solely on its Internet division, which includes such properties as Switchboard.com and DogPile.com. The company’s online business is expected to have a 12-month revenue run rate of about $140 million.

Or maybe not. Now that InfoSpace has sold off its internet division, will it now sell its mobile business too? That would pretty much leave the company with just its metacrawlers–such as Dogpile–hardly the strongest of its assets.

I’m guessing either the TBJ is spot on, and this is a closing down sale by InfoSpace, or they’re way off and InfoSpace plans to focus on building its mobile division. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Andrew Shane of Idearc told WebProNews that Idearc would be retaining the Switchboard.com domain name. The purchase of Switchboard.com and other InfoSpace directory assets will increase the scale of Idearc’s online directory platform, Superpages.com and benefit Idearc advertisers who will be seen by more consumers.

"This transaction is consistent with our strategy of driving revenue generation across multiple platforms," said Kathy Harless, President and CEO.

"With the addition of Switchboard.com and its associated networks, we are increasing the scale of our fast-growing local search platform, enabling our advertisers’ content to reach even more consumers and boosting our high-quality organic Internet traffic base."

InfoSpace, whose board approved the deal, operates metasearch site dogpile.com along with other search sites. The company said it plans to give proceeds of the sale to stockholders through cash distribution.

The deal is expected to be completed in the next 30 to 60 days.

"This acquisition is an excellent fit with our existing operations and creates a significant opportunity for us to monetize our local search inventory," said Harless.

"We are excited about the additional value and quality traffic this deal brings to our portfolio and the related value proposition to our advertisers."

Blinkx, InfoSpace Partner

Dogpile is a search engine that returns results from Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask.com. InfoSpace’s partnership with blinkx will give users the same search results as it does with text-based searches.

"Video search has become increasingly popular among today’s Web searchers, and this addition allows us to offer Dogpile users a more visual and interactive search experience," said Brian McManus, executive vice president of the online business unit at InfoSpace.

"blinkx is a leader in the video search space, and we chose them to power our offering because of their extensive video content library and advanced video search technology. blinkx also provides results from a variety of video aggregators such as Brightcove, which makes this partnership a great fit for Dogpile, as the leading metasearch site in the U.S."

blinkx says they have twelve million hours of indexed video and audio content, including news clips, short documentaries, music videos and video blogs. They use speech recognition technology to return results that are accurate and reliable.

"InfoSpace has a well-established and trusted family of metasearch products, and we’re delighted to provide video search capabilities to their millions of users worldwide," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx.

"This partnership continues to build upon the momentum for our patented conceptual search technology and further demonstrates our leadership in the online video arena."

Yes – Google does carry the most significant share of the market with well over 49% of all searches*, so by no means am I suggesting you neglect Google in your SEO plan. But when you understand the diversity of search results across the major search engines, you’ll see that balancing your optimization efforts can generate great results.

Infospace are a Meta search engine, so their motives for the study might be open to discussion, but the results are the key. The study titled "Different Engines, Different Results" was conducted by The Pennsylvania State University and Queensland University of Technology in April this year. The press release announcing the study’s finding highlighted the following key points:

• Only 0.6 percent of 776,435 first-page search results were the same across the top four Web search engines.
• Between 38 and 46 percent of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result, don’t meet users needs and drive users to try additional engines.
• Web searchers on average use three search engines a month.
• Search result rankings differ significantly across major search engines; only 3.6 percent of the number-one ranked, non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines in a given query.

So herein lies the opportunity for website owners. Just because a top Google ranking has eluded you, doesn’t mean you can’t achieve a top ranking in Yahoo!, MSN or one of the other decent search engines. Remember they all use a different algorithm to determine their search engine results.

Yahoo! and MSN might only hold 26%* and 10%* of the search market respectively, but that still constitutes millions of searches every month, which is exposure to potential visitors that you could be missing.

If you’re not tracking and trying to improve your ranking across all the major search engines, you should start now. Try this free position check tool to see how you’re ranking in Google, Yahoo! and MSN for any keyword. By diversifying your search engine optimization, you could open the floodgates to more website traffic.

*comScore US Report – April 2007

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"This study reinforces what we at InfoSpace have long known – often users do not find the results they need with any single search engine. Metasearch offers the most robust and efficient search solution to meet their needs," said Rod Diefendorf, vice president of online and local search at InfoSpace.

"With less than one percent overlap in first page results, there is great value to using a metasearch engine like Dogpile.com to quickly comb through multiple search engines at once for the most relevant results."

The study found that only 0.6 percent of 776,435 first-page results were the same on all top four search engines. Between 38 and 46 percent of all searches did not produce clicks on first- page results.

On average searchers use three search engines a month. Search result rankings were different on all the major search engines with just 3.6 percent of the number one ranked non-sponsored search results were the same on all search engines in a given query.

"There is a perception that most search engines function similarly and deliver the same results, but that is not what these result show," said Dr. Jim Jansen of The Pennsylvania State University.

"In fact, the engines are increasingly diverging in their approach to searching the Web. For some searches, users are obviously missing quality results."

The two companies hope to offer mobile carriers increased functionality, reliability, relevancy and performance in a mobile search solution, merging FAST’s search software, relevancy algorithms, crawling and indexing technologies with InfoSpace’s experience in implementing mobile infrastructure, metasearch, carrier integration and customer-facing ASP solutions.

The partnership between FAST and InfoSpace is geared toward giving mobile providers greater versatility in controlling the user experience across multiple platforms, and deploying business models that better promote their own brands and services.

By 2011, eMarketer predicts brands will be spending nearly $5 billion on advertising, up from $421 million in 2006. FAST and InfoSpace are looking to take advantage of these growth opportunities in the mobile search market, particularly in the realms of personalized mobile search and targeted advertising.

“Our ongoing partnerships on mobile search with leading carriers in North America and Europe highlight our expertise in meeting the needs of their customers,” said Steve Elfman, executive vice president of InfoSpace’s mobile business unit.

“We’re joining forces with FAST to further our integrated approach that will unlock the full potential of mobile search, including enhanced user discoverability and increased carrier revenue.”

“Search is the most used and most profitable tool on the Internet. The FAST and InfoSpace partnership takes the search paradigm to mobile users to allow for controlling and monetizing each user interaction with a robust set of features, built on top of superior portal search and mobile web search,” said John Markus Lervik, CEO of FAST.

“Personalized results enhance user satisfaction, increase purchases, increase traffic, and drive advertising revenue or any other business model deemed important by the mobile carrier.”

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The new service is called “Find It”.

At last, no more having to enter an address or zip code before finding the best pizza in town.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Now I can't see you mama
but I know you're always there
you taunt, you tease me mama
but I never never can keep away
-- Genesis, "Mama" from their eponymous 1983 album with the Perfection pieces on the cover.*

There’s nothing quite like a 47.5 percent jump in one’s stock price to fuel takeover speculation as CNet reported. Though Montreal-based Mamma.com wasn’t talking, an analyst cited whispers that an acquisition could be in Mamma’s future:

InfoSpace and Mamma have been in bed already, with a search advertising deal that distributes Mamma’s advertisers on InfoSpace sites like Dogpile and WebCrawler, the report said. But Mamma doesn’t see what the fuss is about, and issue a statement about it:

Curiouser and curiouser.

*Genesis announced on its website on December 1st, 2005, “There are no decisions by Genesis to perform anywhere whatsoever at this time. This situation will not alter in the next twelve months.”

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Infospace currently owns the metasearch engines WebFetch, Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. These metacrawlers pull from a number of sources including Yahoo, MSN, Google and Ask Jeeves.

Seekport launched in 2003 as an alternative to many of the U.S. based search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN. This deal should provide them with some revenues to help them develop further.

NetImperative quoted Joachim Kreibich, managing director of Seekport said, “Everybody who decides to use the combination of Seekport and InfoSpace gets access to our well-proven search technology as well as to an optimised portfolio of paid results from all relevant providers of paid search. The customer is independent from any single paid search provider, and enjoys better match rates for paid results.”

NetImperative also quoted Dominic Trigg, vice president search & directory Europe at InfoSpace saying: “Seekport offers superior web search results as well as high-end customised solutions like site search and archive search, whilst InfoSpace specializes in monetising search as well as specialised solutions such as pay per call and contextual search.”

Whether either of these companies will pursue portal type services like instant messaging, multimedia content and other feaures is unknown but this should help their position if they do decide to pursue those avenues.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.