Ask.com announced that it has acquired Ask.fm, a social Q&A service, which has over 180 million global monthly users, according to the company. Ask.fm is available on the web, and for Android and IOS. A post on the Ask blog…
FTC Updates Search Engine Ad Disclosure Guidelines
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has updated is guidance to the search engine industry regarding the need to distinguish between advertisements and search results. Search industry veteran Danny Sullivan wrote a letter to the FTC just over a year ago…
September U.S. Search Market: Google Up, Microsoft Flat, Yahoo Down
comScore has released its latest numbers for the U.S. search market. They show Google sites up 0.3% in September at 66.7%, followed by Microsoft sites at 15.9% and Yahoo sites at 12.2%. Ask came in at 3.5%, and AOL came…
Ask.com Acquires About.com For $300 Million
IAC announced that its Ask.com property has agreed to acquire The About Group from The New York Times for $300 million. The About Group, of course, is the company behind About.com. The deal was signed on Sunday. “The About.com acquisition…
Ask Looks To Spread Its Q&A To 30,000 Publishers With nRelate Acquisition
Ask.com has acquired content recommendation company nRelate for an undisclosed sum. nRelate is a service that serves up related article content on publishers’ pages in a box, similar to the one pictured. There is also an ad component, which enables…
Google Obviously Powers Ask.com’s Paid And Organic Search Results
Not that this will necessarily come as a surprise to you, but it seems pretty obvious that Google is powering Ask’s organic search results. Ask has an open partnership with Google for its sponsored search results, but will not come…
Ask PollRoll App Aims To Help Users Navigate Through SXSW
Ask has debuted a new mobile app at SXSW, which a company spokesperson tells WebProNews “combines the instant gratification of a poll with the answer depth and social context of a Q&A service.” “The app will help users in Austin…
Top Searches & Questions of 2011 (According to ASK & AOL)
Earlier this week, we looked at Bing’s year-end round-up (be it a little early) of the top searches of 2011. And the lists continue as today both AOL and Ask released their versions. Ask’s fittingly come in the form of…
Old School Search Engines: Where Are They Now?
We thought it would be fun to take a walk down search engine memory lane and look at what some of the search engines from the times before Google’s domination are up to these days. Remember the days when the…
Ask Redesign, Human-Powered Q&A Rolls Out to All Users
Ask has 63 million users these days. That is one thing that stands out in the company’s latest announcement. The announcement itself is that Ask.com has launched its human-powered Q&A service “Ask People” to all of those users. This has…
Ask Android App Launches
Ask has launched a new Android app offering a mobile Q&A service to users. The launch follows that of its iPhone app, which recently surpassed a million downloads. “We have placed a big bet on mobile as part of our…
Ask Adds Partners to Bolster “Smart Answers” for Q&A
Ask has announced several major partnerships designed to fuel the company’s growing Q&A service. More specifically, the partnerships will drive expansion of Ask’s “smart answers” across more categories including: sports, recipes, travel and music. The point of the “smart answers”…
Ask Taps YouTube API For Enhanced Video Results
Online video continues to blow up, and a lot of startups are capitalizing on it. Ask says that as a Q&A site, it sees a larger percentage of “how to” questions around art, science, cooking and exercise that are “begging…
3 Questions for Ask CEO Doug Leeds (And His Answers)
This week, Ask.com celebrated its 15-year anniversary. You may recall a time when Ask was one of the most-used and talked about search engines on the web, and now the company has basically abandoned search in favor of a focus…
SXSW – Ask Combines Q&A with the Location-Based Service
Ask announced a couple weeks ago that it would be debuting a new mobile app called Ask Around here at SXSW. WebProNews caught up with Ask.com Chief Product and Technology Officer Lisa Kavanaugh to talk about it a little. “We…
Ask Breaks Down Popular Holiday Gifts Based on Questions Asked
As Christmas approaches, Ask is sharing some info about the hottest gift items this season, based on users of its Q&A service.
According to Ask’s findings, in the gaming category, Xbox is at the top of the list, with over 5% of all Ask.com questions being related to the console. According to the company, gamers asked nearly five times more questions about the Xbox than the Sony Playstation. Nintendo’s Wii was somewhere in between.
Dunkin Donuts Coffee and iPads Popular in 2010 Among Ask Users
It’s now December, and in the search industry, that means it’s the time of the year that we get to look at the most searched things of the year. Bing shared its top ten searches the other day. Ask recently retired from true search, in order to focus on the niche its name suggests – questions and answers.
Is a Shake-Up Brewing in the Search Market?
More WebProNews Videos Google has been dominating the search market for years. Simply put, if you ask most people to search for something on the web, their first instinct is to go to Google. More and more people might be…