While Google continues to hold the number one spot in this market, with a share of 66.2%, Bing now holds the second position with a 15.2% market share, and is followed by Yahoo! with a 14.1% market share.

Google and Bing have shown a marginal growth over the previous month by 0.3 and 0.1% respectively. Yahoo! has seen a fall of 0.4% in market share. These figures are valid for the Explicit Core Search.

Numbers for Total Core Search are slightly different. In this category, Google continues to hold the first slot with a 66.2% market share, but Yahoo! is second with a 16.0% market share and is followed by Bing with a 13.8% market share.

In both categories, Ask Network and AOL Inc. hold the fourth and fifth places respectively.

When Ask.com was first founded in 1996 it was called Ask Jeeves and they were the first search engine to offer a Q & A format. However, after seeing the success that Google enjoyed with their algorithmic search service, Ask Jeeves chose to follow suit and soon rebranded to Ask.com.

After years of trying to compete with Google, Yahoo! and more recently with Microsoft, in late July 2010, Ask.com decided to restart the Q & A service, alongside their algorithmic search engine. They have now decided to focus their resources exclusively on the Q & A service. Google or Bing will now be used to power searches on Ask.com.

Rumours of a possible acquisition by Microsoft had circulated online last year. However, nothing came of that, and neither Yahoo! nor Microsoft formed any alliance with Ask Jeeves. Google continues to supply sponsored link advertising in addition to Ask.com’s own advertising programme.

Ask.com’s President Doug Leeds says, “This is the best use of our scarce resources.” In the past, Ask.com used to serve close to 2 million users a day. But in spite of their advanced features that provided a seamless search experience, they could not continue to compete with Google, which holds about 65% of the market share in the USA and over 90% in Europe.

In effect, they will be shutting down their offices in Edison, NJ and Hang Zhou China. Some of the staff from those offices will be asked to relocate to the Bay Area headquarters. About 130 employees are expected to lose their jobs.

facebook.com/questions

Facebook Questions will allow users to ask questions on any topic, to the entire Facebook community, as the question will not only be received by friends and friends of friends, but also by those who are known to have knowledge of the concerned subject.

Users will receive answers not only from their friends and friends of friends but also from a much wider and authoritative source, thus making this feature resemble a new aspect of their search service.

This feature will make Facebook compete not only with traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo! but also with other Q&A formats like Aardvark, Quora and Ask.com.

An “Ask Question” button will be available at the top of the homepage. The user will simply need to click on the button and then write a question. Users will also be able to attach a photo or a poll to the question.

In order to get the best results, users can also add an appropriate tag to the question, so that it is shown to specialists in that field. Users can also click ‘Follow’ under any question to get notified every time a new answer is received.

An answer page on Facebook Questions

While questions asked through this service will be public, those who wish to ask a question only to specific friends, can put up the question as a status update on their profile marked to those friends.

Facebook may have to face a backlash once again regarding user privacy, as this feature will be public.
At present only about 1% of Facebook’s 500 million users will have access to this facility, and it will gradually be made available to all.

When the site was first launched in 1996, it featured a unique question-and-answer format for providing information, and was called Ask Jeeves. Users could ask questions using natural language queries, and, as the name suggests, the site would provide appropriate answers.

In 2005, the site was re-branded Ask.com. Users could still ask general questions and the site would try to provide satisfactory answers.

Over the years, several changes occurred until it finally became a general search engine. However, the market share they have managed to corner is extremely small and thus they have decided to go back to the original Q&A format.

The new Ask Jeeves site

The answers provided to the questions asked will be collected from the Ask.com search engine and also from answered obtained from other Q&A sites, as well as from answers provided by users of Ask.com.

Ask.com’s senior Vice President for product management Tony Gentile said that “search didn’t work out so well” for the company and given that search isn’t what Ask.com is known for, it only makes sense for the company to get back to its roots.” Hence they have gone back to the Q&A format.

They have started working on this feature since last year itself and they currently have authoritative answers to 60% of the queries on the site. They also claim to have the largest Q&A data base with over 500 million Q&A’s having been indexed.

To answer the remaining 40% of queries, Ask.com has asked users to create their profiles and select subjects on which they are qualified to answer questions. Questions will be forwarded to these users as per their field of expertise. The questions will reach the appropriate user through email and also through prominent messages on Ask.com.

The question will also be put up on the general site for other users to answer. Users will also be able to vote the answers up or down, thus giving the site a social networking tweak.

While the service will definitely face competition from sites like Quora and Aardvark, they may have a head start because of their huge user base of 87 million monthly users.

The service is currently in the beta testing stage, and people can join it by invitation only. Ask.com also plans to make the service available through mobile apps in the future.

The latest rumour making the rounds is that Microsoft may buy Ask.com, which has been up for sale for a long time now. Barry Diller, the Chairman of InterActive Corp, the parent company of Ask.com, has said that the search market is challenging, and he would be quite willing to part with his search engine (In exchange, for appropriate remuneration, of course.)

Under the circumstances, Microsoft would seem to be the most likely to buy over the company.

Although Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is doing quite well for itself, especially after announcing various deals with Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo!, it is still a distant third in the search engine market, with only about 9.4% market share in the USA.

Ask.com, which is ranked 4th in the search market, holds about 4% of the market share, which would help Bing gain a better foothold in the market. Also, this deal could interest Microsoft, as Ask.com earns most of its revenue from an advertising deal they have with Google.

Microsoft would also not have to deal with any regulatory concerns, as they still have a very small percent of the total market share even after their deal with Yahoo! is factored in.

Lastly, Microsoft would certainly have the resources to takeover Ask.com if they are so inclined.

With 64.9% of the U.S. market share and over 85% of the European search market still securely tucked under its belt, Google can still rest easy.

Data pulled from the 4 billion page views collected across more than 3 million websites that use the StatCounter analytics solution showed that Google monopolises the mobile search market. The search giant, whose brand is now a neologism for searching, delivered 96.23% of mobile searches worldwide in the first half of 2009.

Yahoo! follows second, worldwide, with 3.24% mobile search market share and Yandex.ru is third with 0.14%.  Ask Jeeves (0.11%) and AltaVista (0.07%) round off the top 5 mobile search providers. The rest, including Microsoft, account for no more than 0.21% of the worldwide mobile search volume.

In the UK, the situation is similar, with Google commanding 98.8%, followed by Yahoo! (0.86%) and, surprisingly, Ask Jeeves (0.14%).

Before screaming “anti-trust” or falling into depression caused by the world turning into a Googleopoly, let’s take a moment to examine the data…

While the size of StatCounter’s data set is nothing to laugh at, most of its volume comes from fixed internet websites rather than mobile sites. In fact, the page views and number of sites using StatCounter to track visitor data on the mobile Internet is bound to be much, much lower.

That’s not all. StatCounter data itself is not wholly credible due to the fact that they use cookies and JavaScript to track visitors, both of which often don’t work when websites are viewed 0n a mobile device. Therefore, any data delivered by StatCounter is only valid for a small subset of all the different mobile phones consumers use to search the Internet.

Last year, Nielsen reported that Google’s mobile search market share in the USA was an estimated 61%, while Yahoo! and Microsoft got 18% and 5% respectively. Not a lot has changed in the mobile search market since June 2008, which makes it safe to assume that Nielsen’s numbers would not be drastically different today.

This still leaves us back at square one, asking “has Google already won the race for mobile search supremacy before it even really began”?

The Mobile Search Benchmark is a means of ranking mobile search providers, with regards to five different criteria. They are, discoverability, readiness, availability, response time and consistency for a search operation carried out through a mobile handset.

Only the larger, better-known search providers have been considered for this survey. The selection was based on comScore’s Expanded Search Query Report published in July 2008.

Nine companies were selected for this survey: Yahoo!, Amazon, Ask, Google, AOL, Craigslist, eBay, MySpace and MSN. Facebook was not included in this survey, as their mobile web applications did not meet the technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a uniform playing field for all participants, a predetermined task was set out, with a fixed set of steps to be used while performing the search operation on each participating provider. One had to first navigate to the home page of the mobile web site, type a search query, and then click on ‘search’. The search results page would then be displayed and would show the search result obtained for that specific query, which were then graded.

According to the study, Yahoo! has currently been ranked the best site for mobile search operations. The provider rankings within individual categories were as follows:

Discoverability

Ability of a consumer to discover the location of a company’s mobile site on the Web.

1. Google
   MySpace
   Yahoo!
2. AOL
   eBay
   MSN
3. Amazon
4. Ask
5. Craigslist

Readiness

Ability of the mobile web site to be rendered on popular mobile devices.

1. Ask
   eBay
   Yahoo!
2. Amazon
   AOL
   Craigslist
   Google
   MSN
3. MySpace

Availability

Percentage of successful transactions out of the total number of transaction attempts.

1. Google
2. Amazon
3. Craigslist
4. eBay
5. Yahoo!
6. MySpace
7. AOL
8. Ask
9. MSN

Response Time

Time required to download each page in an entire multi-step transaction.

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Craigslist
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. MSN
9. eBay

Consistency

Standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions

1. Amazon
2. Craigslist
3. Google
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. eBay
9. MSN

Overall Ranking

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
   Amazon
   Ask
3. AOL
   Craigslist
   eBay
4. MySpace
5. MSN

The research also measured performance of mobile sites in other industry verticals. AirTran was found to be the highest ranked mobile airline site and Bank of America was ranked top for mobile banking.

Overall, though, the results indicated that mobile websites are 30% less efficient than traditional Internet sites.

Americans carried out 13.5 billion searches in the month of January 2009. This figure is 7% higher than the corresponding figure just one month ago, in December 2008.

Expectedly, Google sites were the leaders in the number of searches conducted with 59% share of the market, followed by Yahoo! sites having 15% market share and Microsoft sites having 6% share of the market. AOL and the Ask Network had 3.9% and 3.7% respectively.

Of the 11.7 billion (up 5% from December 2008) searches conducted across all Google sites in January 2009, Google Search accounted for 75% while YouTube and other Google sites contributed to 25% of the volume.

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search metrics are much more heavily skewed towards their main search properties, with both contributing to 99% of their individual total volumes.

AOL and the Ask Network, on the other hand, had a much more even distribution. 58% of AOL searches coming from the search network while 42% came from MapQuest and other AOL properties. Less than half (49%) of the Ask Network’s searches came from Ask.com while 51% came from MyWebSearch and other properties.

A comparison with the same period a year ago shows that Google’s market share grew 6% points between January 2008 and January 2009, while that of Yahoo! fell 2% points and Microsoft fell 1% point.

Yahoo!, though, has actually gained market share for the fifth consecutive month now, at the expense of Microsoft and Ask.com mostly, but also at the expense of Google last month.

The merger with CNet Networks will put CBS in the top 10 list of web publishers, with 54 million visitors per month, and it will reach 82% of web users in the U.S.A. All the sites run by CNET, including News.com, GameSpot, MP3.com, MySimon, and ZDNet. will be integrated with CBS’s interactive brand operations on completion of the deal.

President of CBS Quincy Smith says, “together we will have a terrific opportunity to grow our established businesses and build new attractive verticals of content. This is the beginning of an era for CBS and CNET networks.” It is very likely, however, that there may be some hiccups during the integration process, as CBS is known to be lavish in its spending habits while CNET is known to be rather thrifty.

In the second big merger, InterActive Corp (IAC), owner of Ask.com, plans to buy Lexico, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com, for $100 million in cash. This move is expected to improve the position of Ask.com in the search engine market, as the new sites will drive 145 million additional users per month.

The merger with Lexicon will also enable Ask.com to earn more revenue through display advertisements shown to people asking basic questions, as most searches on Ask are for reference material.

Finally, media company Comcast plans to buy Plaxo, which is a social networking site. Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says, Comcast plans to “bring the Social Media experience to mainstream consumers.” The financial details of this deal have not been disclosed yet.

The idea is that Comcast could be Plaxo’s launching pad, helping the company grow its user base beyond its current 50 million users. Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center, slated to launch this year. Plaxo will also work on socially enabling the Comcast.net portal and Comcast Interactive Media’s Fancast and Fandango properties.

Yahoo! has chosen India to beta test this new search feature as India is a very fast growing market. If user reaction to the feature is positive, they will offer this feature in other countries as well. To start with, Glue pages will cover the travel, sports, health, technology, finance and entertainment verticals – topics that will have a large amount of information and several sources.

Glue pages are expected to improve the over all user experience. Mr. Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience at Yahoo! India says, “this concept integrates the best of info in a visually appealing manner.”

The new search results page format is very similar to the search results found on Ask 3D. However, they differ substantially from the Google universal search results page, in that, here the information is be put up in the form of separate columns. The layout of the columns varies from topic to topic. Even the placement of sponsored links seems to be varied across searches.

….
Comparison of Yahoo! Glue pages and Ask 3D results

Search results will now be inclusive of news, videos, music, images, Wikipedia articles and information from other sources. Users can browse through videos, articles and images on a given topic within the same page without needing to click through to visit multiple pages. The time wasted in the actual search process will now be considerably reduced.

Glue pages seem to be indiscriminately “open” in their choice of sources. Content is drawn from sites such as Last.FM, Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks.com and even YouTube, which is owned by their main competitor, Google!

Users who are not satisfied with the Glue pages can switch to the old format by simply clicking on the “classical search” tab. Yahoo! Has obviously put in some time and effort to offer a lot of good information in user friendly manner on their search results page. It is a shame though, that Ask beat them to the punch by a long time, and the improved layout did nothing to help improve Ask’s marketshare. History is not on Yahoo!’s side in this case, even if they are pinning their hopes on attracting and retaining more searchers through this improved search format.

The once popular search site, whose market share has dwindled to just 3%, has finally given up its pursuit of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Instead the company will return to square one and focus on doing what it started off with – answering questions.

Ask Jeeves, as it was called at the start, began as a question-and-answer type of resource. Users were prompted to “Just type a question and click ‘Ask!’” They were also shown example questions that others were asking. Naturally, most queries on the search engine were in question form, starting with ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘who’ or ‘how’.

That initial habit fostered among users has stuck with the brand. A larger than normal portion of their user base still formulate queries containing questions rather than just searching for keywords. Even though the site changed and the butler Jeeves got fired, the user mindset never completely adjusted to thinking of Ask.com as just another search engine, in spite of the quality of their results being comparable to Google. Now they are simply returning to their roots.

Women from the Midwest and Southern United States form the majority of Ask.com’s user base. Catering to their needs is therefore an obvious choice. Ask.com will now help married women looking to manage their lives by answering questions about recipes, hobbies and children’s homework.

Now that Ask.com is out of the picture, and Microsoft looks likely to acquire Yahoo!, the search engine market is turning into a duopoly with an extremely dominant front-runner, Google.

Update:

Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham has stated that the rumours in the mainstream media are not true. “The idea that we’re going to become a women’s site is just plain wrong. We know that a sizeable group of our core user base is women, and we know they come to us for a certain kind of search: to get answers, often in areas of reference, health and entertainment,” he said, “We recognize that we can’t be all things to all people, so we’re focusing on our core group of users. We want to build up the kinds of answers those users are looking for, while at the same time remain a strong search site.”

The graph alongside holds few surprises. Google has consistently held its pole position in the ranking of search engines. In January 2008 alone the search giant received 7.7 billion search requests on its combined properties, which include Google Search (6.2 billion searches) and YouTube (1.5 billion).

Google’s market share in the US crossed 50% in September 2007, and it hasn’t fallen below the half way mark since then. Yahoo! continues to trail far behind with 2.5 billion searches, followed not as far behind by Microsoft with 1 billion searches. If the 2nd and 3rd ranking players in the market were to join forces, their combined search volumes would be 3.5 billion, accounting for 24% market share.

Over the past 6 months Google has continued to grow at the expense of its competitors. The graph below compares the growth in number of search queries received on each of the Top 5 ranked search engines.

Google grew 14% in terms of the number of queries received over the past six months. Even though all the providers grew in Jan 2008 compared to December 2007, the six-month numbers are not as good for anyone other than Google. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have fallen, the latter by as much as 7% compared to August 2007 numbers.

http://news.ask.com/news

Stories on BigNews will be graded by a ‘BigFactor’, which is based on various indicators such as how recently the event occurred, availability of photographs, the impact created by it, the number of links generated, etc. Unlike Digg though, viewer’s votes will not be allowed to directly affect the story’s rankings.

BigNews will provide top stories to Digg. In return, the top 5 Digg stories and 5 Digg articles that have not garnered any votes yet will be featured at the bottom of the BigNews page. A Blogviews section placed on the right, alongside the main stories, will highlight the latest posts and topics being discussed from popular sites like TechCrunch, CNN, USA Today and The Hollywood Gossip.

Every story on BigNews will include a BigFactor counter and a “Track” button on the upper right hand corner. Passing the mouse over the counter reveals information about the various factors contributing to the score. Clicking on the “Track” button opens a drop down list of popular news aggregators where the story can be followed, including Google, Yahoo! and even regular RSS. The story snippet also cites sources from which the story has been collected.

Ask have implemented this new sub-domain keeping in mind the true spirit of Universal Search. On the homepage visitors can view top news stories, blogs, videos, images and even Digg stories. In contrast, most of the other news aggregator sites stick to one or two result formats, usually text and images.

According to Ask.com, BigNews is a site for people who like to see different viewpoints to their story. For starters BigNews is reported to have more than 10,000 sources. Prominent among them are, The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News and MSNBC. BigNews has not yet released details on how other publishers can get add their news content. It is expected that such features will be made available shortly.

Search Engine Predictions

1. Google will continue to grow and play even tougher
2. Yahoo! will become the next AOL, suffer more layoffs, shut down more divisions but still stay independent
3. Microsoft will try rebranding and reorganizing its online brands again (to no avail)
4. Ask and AOL will continue being insignificant and border on the brink of becoming obsolete

Startup Predictions

1. Web services platforms will become the next battleground
2. Zoho, ThinkFree, Tumblr, Twitter and Digg will be acquired by larger companies
3. $27 billion of venture capital will be invested in startups and Mergers and Acquisitions will increase in volume but not as much in value
4. Consumer adoption of web office applications will grow

Advertising Predictions

1. Google AdWords will continue to grow and dominate the advertising market
2. Gadget Ads will present the area of greatest growth
3. Content networks will evolve and platforms will produce their own content (e.g. Google Knol)

Mobile Predictions

1. Mobile will finally happen!
2. Mobile web usage will grow
3. A second generation iPhone will be released to combat Google Phones (devices based on Android)

Social Media

1. Facebook will grow, but with a lot of bumps along the way
2. Privacy will become a greater concern
3. YouTube will announce HD video, ushering an era of ubiquity of online video
4. Facebook will forge independent deals with startups, making Google sweat!

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Barry Diller, CEO of IAC said, “our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors.”

The parent company, IAC (Stock ticker: IACI)will now include their principal search and user generated content businesses and associated advertising properties Ask.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Excite, InsiderPages, IAC Advertising, My Way, Webfetti, Zwinky, Match.com, Gifts.com and a number of other investments.

LendingTree, the popular mortgage and loans market place will be spun off to form its own company along with RealEstate.com, iNest, Domania, GetSmart and Home Loan Center.

Similarly, TicketMaster, the leading online ticket brokers will be separately incorporated. The group will include a number of domestic and international ticketing businesses including Admission.com, TicketWeb, Ticnet.se, Frontline and iLike.
HSN will hold their retail businesses including HSN TV, hsn.com and some catalogue, e-tail and retail businesses. Interval International will focus on travel businesses and will include CondoDirect and VacationSource.com.

Reaction to the announcement has been mixed. Some analysts have raised concerns that the split might not be easy. Most perceive the break up to be motivated by a desire to rid Barry Diller’s flagship search property, Ask.com of struggling businesses such as HSN and LendingTree, which were pulling down net profits. “A couple of companies in Diller’s portfolio had been dragging down the value of the rest of the company,” said Fred Boxa, a principal of IBB Consulting Group, “The value of IAC’s companies is higher split apart than together.”

Diller also announced during a conference call on Monday that IAC has renewed a pact that keeps Google the exclusive provider of search ads that appear on IAC’s Ask.com for the next five years.

The new system will provide information about average positioning to help advertisers determine how much to bid and allow multiple ads to test different creatives against the same keywords. However the new system will only allow optimised delivery for multiple creatives and will not provide the ability to opt out of the CTR impacting the delivery. The main features of the new system, as reported by Ask are:

• Improvements in cost and budget controls
• New ad structure improves content management
• Streamlined UI simplifies common tasks
• More flexible reporting
• Enhanced Bulk Upload tool.

In a race that is already being fought by heavyweights, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, Ask.com’s announcement has hardly generated any effect. However, they cannot be blamed for trying. The pot of gold that is search advertising is ever-expanding and the likes of Microsoft are sticking around in spite of possibly losing as much as $1 Billion per year according to Information Week.

Ask Sponsored Listings program can be viewed at:

http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com/

Ask is hoping that the introduction of Ask Mobile in the UK might help boost its popularity. The company has launched a television ad campaign, a billboard campaign and even an ad campaign in the London Underground in an attempt to win UK market share.

Myles Runham, general manager for Europe at Ask.com, said that Ask Mobile provides a much more direct alternative to finding results than traditional browser-based search by taking the simplest approach rather than making users navigate through a number of search results. He said, “It’s extremely successful in the US, so we’re hopeful it can have the same impact over here.”

Ask Mobile currently includes Web search, images, business listings, maps, weather, bloglines, area codes, currency conversion, horoscopes and time zones in the USA. The Web Search page provides recent searches and example search terms in the form of clickable links below the search box. Unfortunately, Ask Mobile does not incorporate any of the design genius of the new Ask Search, and the mobile search results seem to bring up a mix of regular Internet sites and mobile-friendly sites.

Mobile Internet users can search on Ask Mobile by visiting:

m.ask.com