The Inquisitr » ask.com

Yahoo Glue: I can’t believe it’s not Mahalo!

Duncan Riley — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:11:37 +0000

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Glue in the United States, a Mahalo style search engine that offers a mix of rich media and text along with traditional search results.

According to Mashable, Yahoo found the service so successful in their India test launch that they’re extending the product for inclusion in US search results off main Yahoo.com search queries.

Ask.com went down the same route back in October, although Yahoo isn’t extending the layout to all results just yet.

First impressions are positive: it’s a great way to take in search results. However there is a catch: the results are traditional Yahoo style lame. In fact the results in Glue are worse than the Yahoo search results, and the site seems to be truly Mahalo style as results aren’t automatically generated (as they are with Ask.com) but come from a set of pre-determined results, possibly even added by humans. While that makes for decent pages for searches like Barack Obama, it’s useless past maybe the B or C list in the world of politics, countries and celebrities, but presumably this will improve with time.

UPDATE: Yahoo has been in contact with some corrections. Glue is completely standalone and not part of general search, and the results are delivered by algorithm. We apologize for getting these facts wrong, but I have to ask: if the results are computer generated, why isn’t there more of them? I did ask and the response was that they plan to “continue expanding the coverage for Glue Pages over time.” I should clarify at this point that I actually love the layout, just the lack of depth, which is lame. Hopefully they’ll ramp it up soon. This is the sort of thing that might deal Yahoo back into the search game.

Mahalo now officially a blog

Duncan Riley — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:26:45 +0000

Jason Calacanis has relaunched “human search engine” Mahalo as a gigantic blog targeting news that drives traffic in any vertical.

The new Mahalo adopts the magazine style layout currently popular in the blogosophere, aggregating news stories in a layout that is part Google News. There’s even a “live blog” right of screen, which is updated with links to breaking news outside of Mahalo by members of the Mahalo team.

When Ask.com relaunched last week and we discussed the similarities to Mahalo, the biggest difference I noted then was that Mahalo offered stale, out of date links, vs Ask.com offering the latest content. This hasn’t really been addressed by these changes, at least with the search results. Our example before was the Mahalo page for Angelina Jolie being woefully out of date with news links, and that is still the case today. Instead Mahalo has switched to a blog content first model that creates new entries (really blog posts) for big stories, rich with keywords, then uses the original search pages for contextual links within each post.

Mahalo has been slowly moving toward becoming a blog now for some time, having already abandoned its focus on quality search results, instead offering comment and content with those results. That the site has seemingly abandoned its search starting point may speak poorly of the model to start with, but Calacanis is the sort of guy who is’nt afraid to change direction if things aren’t working, and he wealth of experiencing in blogging that will help Mahalo establish itself as a leading blog. Certainly numbers from Compete and Alexa show Mahalo flat-lining (Quantcast shows growth to the end of August…and then a drop), so kudos to Jason for taking the plunge and trying something new.

(in part via Cnet)

Mahalo

Ask.com revamp smells like Mahalo

Duncan Riley — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:35:14 +0000

Ask.com has relaunched its search engine with a new emphasis on quality grouping based on likely related topics.

The new engine is said to have been rebuilt from the ground up, with traditional results being displayed with “structured” sources of data in certain categories like entertainment, health and jobs. Questions will also be answered through the delivery of results from Answers.com and Yahoo Answers.

Ask.com’s Jim Safka told the NY Times that the new Ask.com “is faster and returns more relevant results for common queries than in the past” and that “Some of the best content is coming from individuals, not necessarily from professional publishers,” which is good news for bloggers and other small scale web publishers.

The grouping works. A search for Angelina Jolie starts with a short bio, pic, and relevant links in a cluster. You then get two additional results, images from Ask.com and an IMDB link. Next up is a latest news cluster, then TV listings after that again. Parts of the results you already get in Google (in particular news, images and video), but what it looks more like is another service: Mahalo.

The Jason Calacanis founded search engine come content play offers pre-bundled results with an aim to deliver related links people are looking for…pretty much the same use case Ask.com is targeting. Mahalo uses “guides” to generate their pages, so in theory the end results should be more user friendly, and certainly the break down into usable clusters is more thorough than what Ask.com is offering. But likewise, Mahalo has a distinct disadvantage: the need for human updating. On the Angelina Jolie query, the latest news link on Mahalo (at the time of writing) is dated May 28, vs Ask.com at 1 hour. The divide then comes down to not the quality of links, but use case relevance: is a user going to find Mahalo more attractive because it offers better bundling, or Ask.com that offers refresher results, including links to the latest news or gossip.

I’d bet that someone is going to call Ask.com a Mahalo killer, but that person isn’t me. On its original model that was focused primarily on search results, Ask.com would have been a big blow, but Mahalo has changed over time, and today it is part blog-like content play with some obvious SEO benefits in itself, rather than simply the “human-powered search engine” it once was. That, and both sites don’t have strong crossover, so the substitution of use model doesn’t really come into play…well, not significantly anyway.

IAC Takes $170 Million Hit

JR — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:45:47 +0000

InterActiveCorp — owner of Ask.com and other big league web services — is taking a $170 million hit due to decreasing values.

The company has announced a $100 million drop for its lending division, which houses LendingTree.com. It’s also seeing a $70 million drop in its real estate sector, which includes RealEstate.com. IAC blames the bad housing market for the losses.

The company is still planning to break itself up into five separate and independent companies by the end of next month. IAC will handle the Ask.com sites. The other newly formed corporations will be in charge of lending and real estate, home shopping, ticketing, and time-share services.

IAC made headlines just a couple of months ago when it acquired Dictionary.com — adding that site, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com into its Ask arsenal — and then, a week later, bought out StarNet Interactive. StarNet ran the teen-targeted GirlSense site, which matched up nicely with IAC’s similarly teen-focused Zwinky service.

Ask.com

Zwinky

Ask.com Brings Search to Photobucket

Dominic Rivera — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:28:51 +0000

Search engine Ask.com and photo and video-sharing site Photobucket have entered into a multi-year strategic agreement.

Through the pact, the Ask.com search box is now prominently displayed across Photobucket.com, driving millions of additional Ask.com search queries and exposing the Ask.com brand to Photobucket’s 44 million monthly unique users worldwide.

The agreement also includes the syndication of sponsored listings and display advertising to Photobucket.

Ask.com

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Ask.com Finishes Lexico Purchase

JR — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:57:09 +0000

Ask.com has officially finished its purchase of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

The acquisition — first announced back in May — is now a done deal, with the full parent company Lexico now under Ask.com’s control.

The companies still haven’t disclosed a price, though some reports have put it in the $100 million range.

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Ask.com Acquires Dictionary.com

Duncan Riley — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:59:11 +0000

Ask.com has acquired Lexico Publishing Group, the company behind Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

According to wire reports, Ask.com expects to expand its audience to more than 145 million unique monthly users, making Ask.com the ninth-largest web property globally accord to comScore. Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Safka told AP that the company hopes to make more money by showing ads to people looking for answers to basic questions, saying “We want to ’super serve’ those people.”

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, however the sites had previously been sold to Answers Corp, in a deal that failed back in March. The new deal is expected to be completed by the third quarter.