Here are some quick news items for Thursday… If you want something picked apart, Andy Beard is your man. He takes a look at the new features at Blogcatalog and reveals just how close they are to those of MyBlogLog.
Ask.com appears to be fending off a small backlash to their UK anti-Google campaign.
I’ve noticed a lot of new Christian verticals starting-up recently. TechCrunch points to a YouTube clone for Christians called GodTu

Ask.Com’s ‘Revolt’ Risks Costly Clicks from the Wall Street Journal weighs in on the Ask.com guerrilla marketing campaign we covered last month, especially focusing on the negative comments that have appeared on the associated web site.
The article also highlighting the television commercials now airing. I’ve seen these myself on TV here, and a video clip below give you a taste. Click to continue reading…

First in the UK, Ask rolled out a guerilla marketing campaign aimed at sparking an "information revolution" to choose Ask over Google. Now a different yet still mysterious campaign is underway in the US by Ask.
Valleywag reports about billboards on Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose saying "The Algorithm Killed Jeeves" [Ask's old mascot, when it was called Ask Jeeves] and "The Algorithm Is From Jersey&qu

;
I had lunch with Ask CEO Jim Lanzone last Thursday when he was here in the UK, and I’ve been itching to tell
the news he gave me under embargo. Now it’s up, with Jim himself sharing the announcement in video. Kevin Federline’s
Search With Kevin service is being acquired and merged with Ask, to create Ask Kevin. Federline’s also set to head up the new company, with Jim stepping down due to "charisma" factors. Best of luck Jim –

Valleywag writes about a billboard on California’s Highway 101, that reads:
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
The reference is about Ask.com, but the question is: Who bought it? Sure, Google is the likely culprit, perhaps as a response to Ask’s “Information Revolution” campaign, but evidence is pointing in the direction of Ask buying it themselves. The evidence: A later billboard apparently reads:
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSE

It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Br

Off the business wire from yesterday, Ask.com Renews AdCenter License with LookSmart. In short, Ask.com has renewed their agreement with LookSmart to license LookSmart’s “AdCenter for Publishers” through 2009. Basically, LookSmart powers Ask.com’s Sponsored Listings PPC advertising program for publishers.

Google is now reporting how many of its users are subscribed to website’s feeds, by including the subscriber info in the header its Feedfetcher spider leaves when it grabs a feed. This means that if you look at the header, you’ll know how many users combined subscribe to that feed in Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage

Google has agreed to acquire Adscape, a company that puts ads inside of video games, for $23 million. Google had missed out on Massive, a company Microsoft picked up for $200-400 million about a year ago, and is going to have to settle for the much smaller Adscape, which it will have to build into a bigger player

It’s not new for search engines to advertise on other search engines. We
wrote about Live.com doing that on Google
earlier this year,
and that was just the latest in a long line of examples over the years. But
we’ve never heard of a search engine advertising for those seeking another
search engine on a third search engine until now.

The screenshot above explains it all. It’s a search for yahoo.com
on Google, bringing up an ad from Ask.com. Ask — going after Yahoo users who
are searching for Yahoo at Google.
Click to continue reading…

Ask.com, Intuit bringing new data centers to state reports that Ask.com has selected Washington State for the location of a new data center, designed to help save Ask.com money on power. Although Ask.com did not mention which building they have selected, we know they “signed a lease in an existing building in Moses Lake.” Rumors are that they have picked the Titan building, which is in a “former NORAD Missile Control Center.”
Click to continue reading…

IAC/InterActiveCorp reported earnings Tuesday, and the Ask.com parent beat earnings estimates by posting a 67 cents a share profit, compared with analyst estimates of 52 cents. Not all was well, though, as net income on continuing operations was hit bad by a write down of the coupon division, dropping 98% from $119.5 million to $2.69 million compared with last year’s fourth quarter (total net income fell from $113.1 million to $16.7 million).
Total revenue was $1.823 billion, up 7.8% from $1.691 billion a year earlier

The Ask.com blog has a funny post about the failure of a Google product: Their Google-branded pen. If the post is to be taken seriously (and, oh god, don’t), the loss of ink from the pen is a major failure of Google product design and has contributed to chaos in Ask’s offices. They even did the standard Google troubleshooting tip of asking Matt Cutts, but nothing seems to have worked.
“I should have known better than to use a free Google product for business purposes.” Scott told us in a recent interview

Last night Ask.com’s parent company, IAC, reported earnings. Bloomberg reports that IAC’s profits dropped 98 percent in the fourth-quarter. The blame goes to the “entertainment coupon division.” But Ask.com’s media and ad segment division did pretty well, showing a growth of 46 percent in revenue from $109.5 million in Q4 2005 to $159.8 million in Q4 2006.

Got word of some cool smart answers Ask.com is running.
The first is all about events. Presumably leveraging the fact that Ask and Ticketmaster are under the same roof, if you enter a type of event, like “hockey”, or a concert, and a location, you’ll get a smart answer with some upcoming matching events

Google has done a terribly unpopular thing, redesigning Google Images so that it presents no new information, no new features, just increases the white space. It could be one of the worst redesigns I’ve ever seen.
The new Google Images is identical to the old one, except all the text that used to appear on the page, save the title of the image, is hidden, and only appears when your mouse is near the image

Hitwise has released a graph tracking major web-based RSS readers (Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo, Newsgator and Netvibes) over the last year, and their stats show that Google Reader leapt out of a malaise after the release of the new version, and while it has a ways to go before catching Bloglines, it is finally a contender.
On January 6 of this year, Reader had .00011 of all U.S

I’ve been driven nuts by something since October: Ask.com’s Bloglines has been mishandling Google Reader’s shared items Atom feed. I mentioned this two weeks ago, after a Google Reader team member explained to me how Reader’s shared items put out an Atom feed that could be misinterpreted by some RSS readers, due to the way the Atom feed uses the < source > tag.
Well, after a few emails from a guy on the Bloglines team, and at least one time it seemed fixed but wasn’t, I can safely say that Bloglines is now displaying the titles and linking properly in Google Reader feeds

comScore has released their search engine market share numbers for December 2006, and it shows Google continuing to claim more searches as their competition struggles. For 12/06, Google reached 47.3%, a new all-time high, while Yahoo reversed three months of decline to gain .3% and claim 28.5% of the market

Peter Horan, who was the About.com CEO until its acquisition by the New York Times and then moved west to head up small business portal AllBusiness.com, has now been appointed CEO of IAC Media & Advertising.

According to the company, “The CEOs of the Media & Advertising businesses will now report to Mr. Horan, including Jim Lanzone of Ask.com, Briggs Ferguson of Citysearch, Richard Stalzer of IAC Advertising Solutions, and Scott Garell of IAC Consumer Applications and Portals.”

The Google Blog announces that NetCoalition’s efforts to free up stock quotes are close to succeeding. For now, stock quotes online are a messy business, with most websites haveing quotes that are time-delayed (usually 15-20 minutes), or require registration or fees for real-time stock values

Spotted via Marketing Pilgrim, this interview with Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone on his vision and his role within both Ask and parent company IAC:

“We are a world-class technology company and we are able to take ingredients from our sister companies, luckily in many cases premium ingredients because they are number 1 and 2 in their category, and we can remix those ingredients into something that is market leading in a particular vertical

ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin has an interesting interview up with Ask.com CEO, Jim Lanzone. She asks some probing questions, and Jim shares some interesting morsels.
On switching users to the new AskX environment…
The AskX website is a testing ground for what the next generation of Ask.com could be

Ask.com has a page (not so easy to find) listing their most popular searches of the last year. Here’s the list, courtesy of Ask IQ:
Top Searches Overall for 2006
MySpace
Dictionary
Games
Cars
Food
Song Lyrics
Poems
Baby Names
Music
American Idol

Top People Searches for 2006
Chris Brown
Britney Spears
Steve Irwin
Shakira
Jessica Simpson
Angelina Jolie
Carmen Electra
Paris Hilton
50 Cent
Ciara

Top News Searches for 2006
President Bush
War in Iraq
Bird Flu
Iran
Gas Prices
North Korea
Britney

Ask.com sent us their top searches for 2006 by category. Categories include news, celebrity, health, entertainment, images, and sports.

Comscore released their stats for November, showing Google slightly edging out Yahoo for second place, 475.5 million visitors to 475.2 million (out of a total internet population of 736 million). Microsoft continued to hold first place, with 501.7 million visitors. This accounting combines all websites owned or maintained by the various companies, except YouTube, which is still counted seperately

Here’s a rundown of other search engine’s logos for the holidays:
Yahoo ran a nice Flash logo with falling snow and a skating penguin and gingerbread man. Reload the page to see the animation from the beginning.

Here’s the non-Flash image version:

Check out Resource Shelf for some of Yahoo’s logos from other countries.
Ask ran one of their full screen images, this year of snow and a Christmas tree:

Gary Price has Ask UK’s different front page image, a simpler holiday bow

Richard MacManus stumbled on AskX.com, a testing user interface for Ask’s search engine. Ask X, which is being offered up to random Ask searchers, features a UI more advanced than that being offered on any current mainstream search engine, although the features are mostly the same as on the current Ask.com.

Ask X switches to a three-pane interface, moving the Zoom feature to the left

The Yahoo Search Blog features a post about how they’ve opened the new Panama ad platform to new advertisers. I just found it funny that the image in the post (and apparently on the front page of the new ad platform) features a search results page swimming in adverstisements. Close to 70% of the page appears to be paid for, not leaving a lot for the user.

The search in the screenshot is for “cellular phones” but the actual search results page for that term is a little more manageable (although still only 20% of the page is actual search results)

Compete.com’s latest numbers show more good news for Google, as it pulled an extra 3.5 percentage points of market share, commanding a new high of 66% of the search market. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s slide deepened, falling the most it has all year in a single month, losing 3.6 percentage points of share to bottom at 21%.
Compete’s chart (copied above) is great because it shows all the companies as they’ve trended over the previous twelve months

Ask.com launched yesterday a new local search portal, AskCity, designed to make it easier to find all sorts of location-based information in one place. AskCity, located at city.ask.com, features a very clean interface, drawing information from a number of other sites owned by parent company IAC, like CitySearch, TicketMaster and Evite, and more than 20 external sites, including Fandango for movie tickets and OpenTable for restaurant reservations.
The interface sports a control area at the bottom, with a toolbar that lets you add text labels or addresses to the map, draw directly on the map, and place lines and shapes on it

Barry Diller is putting a lot of pressure on Ask. He keeps talking about Ask’s role in IAC’s overall operation and local in particular. When he acquired Ask for almost $2 billion Diller immediately touted Ask’s ability to knit together his disparate online empire into a more coherent whole. He also started talking about how IAC would own local, with several local brands.

Now with the introduction of Ask City, which replaces Ask Local, the search engine has taken a bolder step to create a compelling local product.

Reuters reports that IAC and Ask.com are launching a new local information services site named AskCity on December 4th. The site will combine IAC’s portfolio of Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite and TicketMaster by providing information and services such as Web search, city guides, maps and event listings.

All the major stats services have weighed in on market share in the search industry, and Google is (predictably) still holding onto a huge lead. Problem is, no one can agree how huge that lead is. Take a look at the basic rundown chart, courtesy of Search Engine Watch:

Month


comScore


NetRatings


Hitwise

Google

45.4%

49.6%

60.9%

Yahoo

28.2%

23.9%

22.3%

Microsoft

11.7%

8.8%

10.6%

Ask

5.8%

2.8%

4.3%

AOL

5.4%

6.2%

0.5%

Others

3.5%

8.7%

1.2%

What’s responsible for the differences? Well, some of it is philosophy

Happy Turkey Day, dear readers! Hopefully, everyone (who isn’t boycotting the holiday) will enjoy a feast tonight with the people they love the most.
Here are today’s search engine logos celebrating this day of thanks… giving:
Google:

Yahoo:

Ask doesn’t go all out, as in the past, but does put a, uh, thing, on their front page:

Philipp has an image showing the different Google Thanksgiving logos over the years

comScore has released search engine market share data for October, and both Google and Yahoo gained market share - up 0.3% and 0.1% respectively.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and AOL, they were the ones who coughed-up some points, dropping 0.2% each. Meanwhile, Ask.com hit a wall, remaining steady with a 5.8% share.
So here’s how it looks:
Google 45.4%
Yahoo 28.2%
Microsoft 11.7%
Ask 5.8%
AOL 5.4%
Americans performed 6.8 billion searches in October, up 3% from September and 33% from a year ago.

The Washington Post reports that the SEC wants to charge new fees for accessing and displaying real-time stock quotes. IAC (Ask.com), Google, Yahoo and others in a coalition are fighting back. “The coalition in particular is looking for the SEC to reverse a staff decision allowing the New York Stock Exchange to increase the fees for displaying information from its Archipelago electronic market, some of which had been free