If Barry Diller is looking for somewhere to unload IAC’s Ask.com search engine, he’d be wise to consider Microsoft–if he doesn’t have that in mind already. Analysts reflecting on Diller’s recent remarks about Ask’s “speculative future” say Microsoft is the most likely buyer if IAC is truly serious about dumping the little search engine that couldn’t.
Well, there it is. Barry Diller would rather sell off IAC’s Ask.com search engine than brave a fiercely competitive market with a property whose future he describes as “speculative.”
Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp racked up its second profitable quarter in a row Tuesday despite a decline in advertising. The company–which runs Ask.com and the Citysearch online city guide, among other things–posted earnings of $21.3 million, or 16 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $15.2 million, or 11 cents a share.
Google leads the search industry in market share. No surprise, then, that it leads the industry in customer satisfaction as well. The company has once again achieved top rank among Internet search engines and portals in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, the seventh time it has done so in eight years.
No surprises here. The trend in the November search share rankings is much like the trend in October rankings, which was much like the trend in September rankings–Google claiming still more market share.
In the past year, Microsoft has spent $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search outfit Fast Search & Transfer. The company spent more than $100 million on Powerset and its natural language search. It spent untold millions on R&D. Microsoft has even taken the rather extraordinary step of paying people to use its MSN/ Windows Live search. None of this has done much to prop up its laggard search service, which continues to toddle along behind Google and Yahoo–a very distant third in the search market.
Despite their best efforts, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com just can’t seem to narrow, even slightly, Google’s massive lead in online search. Google’s share of the U.S. search market increased to 68.29% in May from 67.9% in April and 65.13% a year ago, according to market research firm Hitwise.
Coming as it does after news of Microsoft’s plan to bribe consumers to use its search engine, reports of Google’s continued dominance in search aren’t all that surprising.
Ask, the little search engine that can’t, but someday hopes to, is committed to becoming a viable competitor in a market overwhelmingly dominated by Google and Yahoo. It has not, as CEO Jim Safka vehemently points out in an interview with Forbes today, ceded the search battle to anyone.
Turns out Ask.com isn’t as intent on getting in touch with its feminine side as was previously thought.
Company spokesman Nicholas Graham tells Search Engine Watch that an Associated Press report that claimed the little engine that can’t was retooling itself as a search engine for married women primarily living in the South and the Midwest [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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