Stepforth wrote a post a couple of weeks back on Yahoo Reinvents An Old Wheel: Paid Inclusion Gets a Facelift. A comment to this post Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com has attracted a lot of attention.
I'm still against paid inclusion, because I still think it is hypocritical to charge for something we need to do anyway to be the best search service we can be. I also think it's a dis-service to our users to blur the line that much between paid content and editorial content.
A WebmasterWorld thread inquires if anyone has noticed an index update on Ask.com:
Seems to me that Ask underwent a recent update. My traffic just about doubled. Anyone else seeing anything.
A reply on the same thread says:
I'm not seeing anything – if only they would index my site, then maybe I'd get some traffic. You would think spending $5k+ per month would yield some better indexing as I'm giving them 30k keywords.
A Search Engine Watch Forums inquires on the way to get site indexed in Ask.com.
Ask.com's Webmasters page says that its crawlers go around the web from one link to another looking for significant content.
Look Smart has released a press release saying that Ask.com has extended its license of LookSmart's AdCenter for Publishers through 2009. According to the press release:
Ask.com leverages LookSmart's AdCenter as a component of its Ask Sponsored Listings PPC advertising program. Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) is an automated open-auction system that allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize campaigns on Ask.com and its publisher network. Offered through IAC Advertising Solutions, ASL processes more than five billion queries each month, and supports over 30,000 advertisers bidding on more than 10 million keywords.
The SEO industry is celebrating Valentines Day, some with cards, some with icons. Ask Smart Answers is celebrating a full fledged V-Day by providing loads of information and helpful search suggestions. For example, if you are looking up Valentine's Day Date Ideas, then Ask also suggests Extravagant Dates (includes five star hotels and restuarants etc), romantic dates , tips and creative ideas too.
It is indeed a search love triangle as reported by Search Engine Land. Ever heard of a search engine advertising for those looking for another search engine on a third search engine. This is exactly what has happened. A search for yahoo.com on Google results in an advertisement from Ask.com directing Yahoo! searchers. Yahoo! has been one of the major searched term on Google.
Search engine Ask.com subleased nearly twenty four thousand square feet of office space in Oakland from IDG Entertainment. Reportedly, the space is situated at 555 12th Street in Oakland. At the moment Ask.com does occupy some space in the same building but now they will move to the entire eleventh floor. The term of the sublese, however unconfirmed, is said to be through till 2015 and is estimated at about $6 million.
The share of Google in search market in the United States has gone up by 0.4% taking its share to 47.4% as of December 2006. This has been reported by comScore Networks. Yahoo! has also been the gainer seeing an increase of 0.3% which makes it share stand at 28.5%. While Yahoo! and Google are gainers there are some losers also in the form of Microsoft and Ask.com. Microsoft's share saw a decline of 0.5 % bringing down its share to 10.5% and Ask.com's share is at 5.4% after a fall of 0.1%. In December there were around 6.7 billion searches by the web users of US. 3.2 billion searches were done on Google sites and 1.9 billion searches on Yahoo!.
Jim Lanzone, CEO, Ask.com in an interwiew with ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin says that he favors to see himself functioning as a 'chef' remixing content components to make an effective search experience for searchers on the Web. In the interview Donna asks some direct and interesting questions to which Lanzone replies is the most intelligently adequate manner. This interview is pretty informative.
@pagetraffic
