Leading off with a blog entry at the Ask.com blog, named What Should We Do? Ask.com asked the blog readers about launching something around April 1, does it make sense to do it, if it may be perceived as a joke. Of course, they released it, "due to popular demand." Ask.com releases for the first time, a full press release via its blog, with the title Ask.com Introduces RhymeRank™.
Tonight at 6PM (PST), to be released in "Gamma mode" at Ask.com is RhymeRank, "Cutting Edge Technology Provides Phaster and Phresher Related Search Results."
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
Continue reading "Ask.com's First To Serve Up April Fools Joke with RhymeRank"As I reported at SEW Blog, Wall Street Journal's principal technology columnist, Walter Mossberg wrote a raving article on Ask.com named Ask.Com's New Look Scores Big Points Against Search Rivals. This is huge for The Little Engine That Could. With a recent spike in market share, and its new marketing initiatives I am very exciting for Ask.com's future potential.
Here are some quotes from Mossberg;
I've been testing the new Ask.com against the search champ, Google. I've found that in terms of relevant results and ease of use, Ask holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches. It has some very nice features Google lacks, including previews of the sites it finds, an easy way to narrow or broaden your search results, and frequent top-of-the-screen answers that lead you directly to core information.
In general, Ask's search-results pages are richer and better organized than typical Google results, and they give greater priority to content over ads.
Google is still great, and I'm not suggesting everyone abandon it. But Ask.com is well worth a try if you want to benefit from some features that go beyond Google. Like the George Mason basketball team, it just may surprise you.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
John Battelle reports on comScore report that shows Ask.com gaining in market share from Q4 '04 to '05 by 32.8% and Google growing over the same time span by 24.7%. Yahoo dropped in market share by 0.3% and MSN dropped by 2.7%. Still the overall leaders in market share as of Q4 2005 are; Google with 39.8%, Yahoo with 29.3%m MSN with 14.3% and Ask.com with 6.6% of search market share.
With Ask.com's TV recent TV Blitz it will be interesting to see the impact it has in Q1 of 2006.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.
In our continued Ask The Moderators thread, the next question we explored was by Viggen. He asked our roundtable of moderators the following question on what he calls; "private search engines."
what search engines are you using for private searches and why...
We opened up a thread named Private Search Engines Explored for moderator only discussion, and last night opened it up for member discussion as well.
I found it interesting in how each moderator interpreted the phrase "private searches." On one hand, does this mean searches conducted at a password protected search engine? Or maybe it means, searches conducted on a company intranet? Perhaps, he is asking about searches one does each day, but are private in nature? Or maybe he is asking about vertical search engines?
The roundtable of moderator's responses were pretty vast.
Rand Fishkin discussed how he uses Del.icio.us to search on tagged content, Ask.com for "non-search type searches" and Yahoo! for link command searches.
Dazzlindonna explained that if private search engines means vertical search engines, she doesn't use them. Donna is a big fan of major search engines and bookmarking for private searches.
Darrin Ward sticks with Yahoo! Search as his default and Google as his back up, he may also use MSN.
Ben (Phoenix) says he doesn't value Yahoo! Search at all, he sticks with Ask.com and Google. He also is a big user of Google Alerts. For internal private searches he uses Desktop Search, like Google Desktop Search. As now uses Bloglines more and more each day.
I personally use RSS News Searches exhaustedly. I subscribe to searches on a few dozen keyword phrases to be notified via RSS about the latest news and discussions taking place about those keyword phrases.
We would love you to join the conversation at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
Friday we reported on the Ask commercials, but if you haven't seen them as of yet - you can now. Go to the Ask Blog and read their entry Ask In Primetime. You will need QuickTime to view the commercials.
The first is named the Cafe.
In the midst of an Internet cafe where searchers have yet to evolve, one discovers Ask.com's unique tools starts remembering what it's like to feel human.
The second is named the Animals In Pants.
A scientist using the Binoculars tool on Ask ponders the question of what separates man from beast...and gets some help from an unexpected source.

Major compliments to Ask.com for posting these on the blog. And as always, forum discussion on this specific topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.
If you watch some TV in the US or even outside the US, you may have noticed some apes searching on a search engine named Ask.com. Ask.com has released a blitz of TV commercials in Europe and the US to try to show users the unique flavor of Ask powered search and the creative tools Ask provides to it searchers. I have seen one of the commercials, it involves apes searching, representing how its time for a new way to search the Internet. The commercial shows Smart Answers, Binoculars and Ask's other features.
Yea, so you want to see it, don't you. Well, I think I have finally convinced Ask.com to post the commercials at their blog. I have a feeling they will be live sometime today at The Ask Blog, so keep checking (I will update this blog when I know its live).
Forum discussion to break loose at Search Engine Watch Forums.
A thread was created at WebmasterWorld forums named Has ASK Jeeves Updated its Index? but moderator martinibuster. Martinibuster says that he has noticed that Ask.com has been sending him traffic for a page that is about ten days old. That implies that Ask.com's index, which is normally slower to index new pages than Google, Yahoo or MSN, has become fresh with new pages. Martinibuster also believes that Ask.com has "tweaked their algo" to provide higher quality results. For the few searches martinibuster placed, he said the quality is on par with Google and seems to be better than Yahoo results.
Have you been noticing the same thing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld
If you visit Ask.com at http://www.ask.com/ today, you will notice that the Ask.com ">home page is green. They have changed the color from red for St. Patrick's Day. In the past Jeeves dressed up; see March 17, 2004 and March 17, 2005. Clicking on the Ask.com green logo takes you to a St. Patrick's Day search as does with Google and Yahoo! (takes you to a non search page) that are also sporting logos for the special day. However, Ask.com's inner search pages are still red, and so is http://uk.ask.com/, however, they do have a special link to a St. Patrick's Day search.



Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
The Ask blog wrote last night Ask.com France: A Fresh Alternative. That post shows that they have updated the look of http://fr.ask.com/ to be consistent of the Ask.com brand. They also noted that the ranking algorithm used at the French engine is "unique." Finally they have many of the same features at Ask France and will be adding "news feeds, maps and itineraries, online shopping, downloads, etc."
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
After the keynote, which Barry also covered, I got the opportunity to get introduced with Barry Diller and spend a couple minutes with him. So I asked, "what is your vision in all of this for Ask with regards to Latin America and Spanish searchers in general?". He responed, "Latin America is a very important market for Ask going forward (along with other markets too). I think we're not doing enough and all of that will be changing."
That sounds to me like a COMMITMENT to GROWTH. Perhaps Barry understands that Latin America represents an opportunity to gain market share over its competitors? Smart guy! Then again, what if Ask's competitors are way ahead already and it will difficult to catch up as it has been in the U.S. market. Only time will tell, it's still to early to know. In my opinion, they have all just gotten started within the last 12 months.
Opportunities come and go, very few get a good chance to really profit BIG on them. Outstanding keynote! I see great things going on at Ask.
Jeeves who? Teoma who? Welcome to the new Ask.com. Notice no Jeeves. Notice the new side bar. Chris Sherman has the Search Day write up; Ask Looses Jeeves, Gains New Features.
Barry Diller will be giving his keynote shortly. You can listen live, more information at SEW Blog. If you miss it, we will be covering it here, as we normally do.

Last night Ask posted a final so-long to Jeeves with high taste. The blog entry at the Ask blog was named And Now, Our Feature Presentation… They describe how J.D. Ryznar, a famous film maker, produced a final farewell for Jeeves named Jeeves Leaves.
You learn a lot about Jeeves in that short film. He unmasks himself, he shows deep emotion, he brings out the best in Ask, even beating out Google (kinda) in a basketball game, finally realizing that Jeeves has given all he can to Ask - and that the Ask team can keep up the winning on their own.
In this movie you will laugh, cry and be enlightened. The New York Times gives it two thumbs up (kidding....).....
I posted a forum thread on this video at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and there has been an update to the Search Engine Watch Thread.
Good bye Jeeves.
Senior Member, Dayo_UK at WebmasterWorld posted a very interested thread named Ask Crawl Banned sites? The question posed was, does Ask crawl banned sites? If not, does Teoma bot (Ask's spider) activity suggest that Ask has removed the banned site from it's spam list?
Excellent set of questions. I emailed a contact at Ask to get some answers. And guess what, the answer is not black and white, what is with search. I will phrase the answer in my own words.
When a site is banned in Ask, they cease from crawling the site. However, Ask may crawl a banned site during an "experimental crawl," during a site's ban period. From my understanding, recent and consistent bot activity, may strongly suggest that a banned site, may possibly be reincluded in the next index update. You must be able to differentiate the "experimental" bot activity from the normal bot activity, which may be very hard to do.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Jim Lanzone of Ask Jeeves posted a Thanks, Jeeves blog entry at the Ask Blog. He explains all the reasons why it is time for Jeeves to retire, in that blog post, so it is worth a read. There is also a special Jeeves retirement site at www.jeevesretirement.com/desk.
The Ask.com homepage currently is sporting a link to it as such;

Chris Sherman has the official Search Engine Watch article on Jeeves Retires.
Forum discussion covered here. Goodbye Jeeves.
The other day I reported that Google Raids Ask Jeeves's Offices where Matt Cutts took pictures of Ask Jeeves front desk, through the window. Well, Ask Jeeves caught Matt Cutts on tape and posted it at the Ask Blog under the title A Visitor Among Us.
Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
A funny blog post by Matt Cutts named Road trip: Ask Jeeves in Campbell. In his post, he noted that he went to Ask Jeeves in Campbell Pruneyard after eating out in a nearby restaurant. He snapped pictures of the office complex, the signs and even peaked in and snapped an image of the Jeeves cardboard figure behind the Ask Jeeves secretarial desk.
I asked Ask Jeeves to comment on this, but they have no official response as of yet. I expect some type of funny response, possibly even a practical joke by Ask on Google. But time will tell.
For now, you can join the forum discussion on this at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
As I posted at the SEW blog yesterday, Ask Jeeves is going to be dropping the Jeeves butler by the end of this month, according to BBC News UK.
We saw early signs of this coming with Ask France & Japan dropping (or not including) the butler earlier. It is sad that attempts to save the butler seemed to have failed. We covered the rumors of Barry Diller wanting to Rename to Ask Jeeves to Ask a while back, lots of memories will be remembered, including;
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums.
Viggen started a thread at our forums named Does Google hire spammers? It is actually a very interesting question. I asked Tim Mayer of Yahoo! this question at the Yahoo! Party at the Palm's Club Rain at WebmasterWorld Pub Con Vegas 2004. This is how the conversation went...
Tim Mayer came over to me, when I was sitting on some sofa, kind of off in the corner. I asked him he they (Yahoo!) hires top notch spammers in an effort to combat spam. You know, like how governments and large companies hire hackers to prevent being hacked. Tim said they have not, they just hire 'engineers'. Which got me thinking, what if the Yahoo! people decided to pass some special gas through the air at this party. The gas contained a drug that turned spammers into the extreme opposite of a spammer (just a note to readers, I am not using the word 'spammer' in a derogatory fashion). I told Tim, that if they had this solution, it might solve a huge chunk of the spam issues they have overnight. Of course I was joking, everyone at the party were clean, white hats.
But if you look at recent patterns, search engines engineers and top folks are "buddies" with so called spammers. As randfish points out in the thread; "MSN certainly gets the opinions of spammers - particularly in last year's search champs." And yes, Matt Cutts from Google goes out for dinners and talks with spammers very often. Not only that at last years Google Dance DaveN and friends spent a whole night talking with Larry or Sergy (I forget which one) and Matt Cutts in the Google Plex. Yahoo! also invited a bunch of people, half consisting of self-proclaimed search engine spammers to Yahoo! headquarters to discuss the search technology.
Has a search engine ever hired a spammer? Gary Price hired by Ask Jeeves is far from Ask Jeeves hiring a spammer. I did hear a rumor of an old WebmasterWorld player who switched sides of the fence, but I do not know much more about that.
As far as I know, a spammer has never been hired by a search engine as an employee. But yes, they do serve up nice tokens to spammers.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums
I can't remember the last time I said anything negative about Ask Jeeves. But honestly, they haven't been tested much on the Webmaster relations front. So I found a perfect opportunity to test them. Viggen, a well known forum member at many forums, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld forums named Previous Domain Owner Penalty. He basically said that he bought a domain name in 2003 that has a previous penalty, Google told him that. In time, Google and Yahoo released the domain from its penalty, but Ask Jeeves did not. So I told the folks I know at Ask Jeeves to reply to the thread. Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves replied with the following message;
Hello: You can contact us via this page: http://webk.ask.com/contactus
Please choose the "Help with getting your site listed" option and please enter comments on why we should review it.
thanks,
Kaushal Kurapati
Senior Product Manager for Search, Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Great. Now I sit back and track to see how Ask handles this. What is disturbing is that at all the conferences Ask Jeeves says they take all responses seriously and they reply to them by individuals quickly. Why do they do that? Because they don't get the volume of requests that Google or Yahoo gets and they were proud to say they are better at communication than G or Y.
But two weeks later and Viggen has yet to see a response from Ask Jeeves on the topic.
Makes me wonder if Ask Jeeves does take feedback requests seriously?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: Kaushal Kurapati emailed me and has now taken care of the issue.
According to C|Net Ask Jeeves improves image search by adding;
New sophisticated image recognition technologies measure attributes such as image type, shape, brightness and contrast level to determine picture quality.
It is hard to tell from the naked eye, so lets do a search on Danny Sullivan. At Google the first result has nothing to do with the Danny Sullivan I was thinking about. But at Ask Jeeves, bingo, the first result is the Danny Sullivan I was thinking about. Of course that is just one search and maybe Ask just got lucky. :)
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
Via Gary at the SEW blog Ask Jeeves: Cache Includes the Date and Time Pages Were Last Cached. Although it takes forever for Ask to Index a New Site, they added a feature to the cache pages, that shows the last crawl date of the page. So for this blog, the last time they crawled the homepage here was January 16th, or 4 days ago! That is for a page that updates several times per day. Whereas my corporate site has a cache date of January 13, 2006 5:14:32 AM.

Note that this kind of reveals how fresh the Jeeves index is...
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
This morning we wrote about Time to Index & Ranking in MSN is a Week or Less and then I saw a new WebmasterWorld thread in the Ask Jeeves forum named Re Index time in Teoma so I figured I cover that one as well.
The response to that question links to an older WebmasterWorld thread on the same topic named How often does AskJeeves update its index? where Moderator caine says;
Re-index schedule used to be between 3-6 months occasionally a couple in one month in the past, but the level of re-index was always sporadic and mainly shallow, hence why teoma's results outside of g, msn and yahoo/atw is probably the worst.
There is not much buzz about search engine optimization on Ask Jeeves. So it is hard to track down threads with more specifics, that are recent.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
This is huge, huge enough for Danny Sullivan to post an image on the SEW blog. Danny writes at SEW Blog, IAC's Barry Diller To Keynote SES NY 2006 Next Month. Yea, that is right, this is bigger then Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Keynote SES San Jose and probably even bigger then Yahoo Cofounder Jerry Yang To Keynote SES NY last year (keynote notes). I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums, maybe members will post interesting questions Danny can use for the keynote?
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
Let me start off by saying that I do not know exactly when Ask launched its French version of the engine. It might have been today, I do not see any press releases on it. But there is a brand new thread on the topic at Cre8asite forums named Ask in France where member Nadir points out the Ask logo on http://fr.ask.com/ does not have the "Jeeves" portion in the logo. It is not only Ask France, it is on Ask España launched a few months ago and also no "Jeeves" name on Ask.jp について. However, "Jeeves" is written out at http://uk.ask.com/ and all of them have the Jeeves character logo.
I wish I would have known if the Japan and Mexician versions had Jeeves written out when they launched. Anyway, it is a subtle thing to notice and it may be part of the Ask Jeeves transition to be known as just Ask.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
Ask Jeeves released their top searches for the 2005 year yesterday. The details are in release but here at the "top 10 list of Ask Jeeves news searches"
1. President Bush 2. Iraq 3. Hurricane Katrina 4. Tsunami 5. Michael Jackson 6. Britney Spears 7. Natalee Holloway 8. American Idol 9. Xbox 360 10. Angelina Jolie
Danny also blogged about it at SEW Blog and I posted a forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.
Finally, Ask has begun to offer page translation for some languages. According to the Ask Jeeves blog entry last night named Word Up they are now offering page translation;
Page Translation is now available on Ask.com. Why haven't we had it in the past? Because we didn't have many foreign-language pages in our index. As we approach site launches in Europe next year, the index has taken on a more international flavor. Voila! We need a codebreaker for those who do not speak seven languages (like most of the folks on our international team). Look for the "Translate this page" link.
They are offering more things explained at the Ask Jeeves blog so check it out.
Also, I clicked on Translate this Page for angela merkel search and it allows me to "Save translated page to My Jeeves." Nice addition.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves all are sporting customized logos for the holiday season. When you go to Yahoo.com and click on the top center logo it takes you to http://events.yahoo.com/holiday05/. When you go to Google.com and click on the middle center logo it takes you to Google's first of many holiday season doodles at http://www.google.com/doodle10.html (more to come). And if you go to Ask.com and click on the Jeeves logo, it takes you to a search results page (as a search engine should, imo) for http://www.ask.com/web?q=Happy+Holidays. Now Ask was sporting a snowman logo yesterday, so they are changing things up, possibly daily for the holiday season, keep and eye on them and Google for logo changes.

Folks are discussing the Google logo at DigitalPoint Forums. And I started a thread for Ask Jeeves at our forums here.
Andy shows that The Street reports that Diller Asks Jeeves to Grow. Specifically by 20% says Berkowitz;
Barry Diller's Internet empire expects to increase the staff at its Ask Jeeves search engine by about 20%, Ask Jeeves head Steve Berkowitz says. The expansion comes as Jeeves, which employs 650 workers now, posts solid gains in traffic but remains overshadowed by its more famous and deeper-pocketed rivals. IAC shares are down 10% for the year.
Steve Berkowitz adds that they need to continue to grow and capture market share.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld where Mack explains that this is a "sharp contrast to their UK opperations where they laid off a large proportion of their sales staff." Think they are letting their UK division go to hell?
We have an interesting thread at our forums named Are Ask Jeeves UK Thieves? This thread describes a UK advertiser's experience with working with Ask Jeeves. In the UK, Ask Jeeves has an advertising program named Branded Response. This program is described as follows;
Branded Response is one of Ask Jeeves premium ad placements. These ads appear prominently near the top of the results page and offer strong targeting, performance and branding opportunities. Branded Response placements are triggered by user keywords and offers high click-throughs. Branded Response is integrated within the results and is highly functional by allowing users to perform searches, fill in forms and begin the online buying process within the ad placement.
The member in the forums reports shocking information about how he was treated with the program. He accounts 33% of clicks, being outside of his target market. More shocking then that is that when reported, Ask would not comply with a refund.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
As many of you know, I got the underdog's back, and Ask Jeeves has been the underdog for a while now. Heck, they helped me propose to my soon to be wife, so of course I love them. ClickZ reports that Search Volumes Rise as Market Matures but in that report they note;
Ask Jeeves emerged as the highest-gaining search engine in the period.The search engine experienced a 77 percent growth in market share to reach 2.6 percent.
I am so happy for Ask. A lot has happened to Ask since our Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could entry here.
Forum discussion posted by yours truely at;
You know those people that rarely listen and just talk and talk? They ask questions, and answer them for themselves. They listen to the first part of your question and ignore the last part?
Well, I caught Ask Jeeves possibly doing that. :) Here is the story line....

I received a sales call from the 206 area code. I often use Ask to look up local times, when I am not familiar with a particular area code. I searched on 206 area code which told me right away that the "206 is an area code in
Washington." Right there I knew I was looking at the west coast, but I decided to click on the link that said, "Local Time", which queried Ask automatically time in washington. It had the correct time, however, the box below began to answer a question I did not ask. So when I wanted to refresh the page, by hitting the go button, I noticed that Washington had the same local time as me, in New York. I then looked closer and I noticed it answered my question as "washington, dc" the second time around. Keep in mind that I search on 206 and then clicked on local time, I did not enter in "time in washington", Ask did that for itself.
Ask, you know it all.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
In the past, I blamed MSN for Indexing Ask Jeeves SERPs but then today I saw that Google is also indexing Ask Jeeves SERPs. See the last result (#20) for tuxedos at Google, you will notice;

But then I spoke with Shawn and DigitalPoint and he took a quick look at Ask's robots.txt file, but couldn't find it at http://www.ask.com/robots.txt. So maybe that is the reason the other engines index Ask SERPs? Maybe Ask wants to be indexed? But why wouldn't Google manually exclude Ask SERP's from its index, since it may be duplicate results plus its linking to a direct competitor...
Remember how I proposed? Well, it drove lots of natural links from quality sites all within a few days. Yahoo!'s linkdomain command brings back 223 links, whereas the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool brings back 129 links to the domain name. Point being, I know "yisha" isn't a competitive term, but that has little to do with ranking number one in a matter of months at Google.
Shows you what a creative idea can do for ones search rankings.
On a related note; the engagement party is this weekend.
Have a good weekend all!
Last year we had creative logos from all Google, Yahoo and Ask - oh lets not forget gmail's logo. We even had a Turkey Day Google Backlink Update! Today, on Thanksgiving 2005, we have some new logos to share with you.
We have a logo from Yahoo! which links to the Yahoo! Holiday Guide 2005.

We have a logo from Ask Jeeves, which links to one of those nice smart answers on Thanksgiving. I also decided to post a thread on Ask's Turkey day logo at SEW Forums.
![sdj_jeeves_thanksgiving[1].gif](http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/sdj_jeeves_thanksgiving%5B1%5D.gif)
We do not yet have an official Google Holiday logo for Thanksgiving yet. But Gmail does have a logo for the day.

Update: Google uploaded it's Thanksgiving logo, which links to a search on thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving All!
Update: Ask will continue with their PPC product, they have no desire to discontinue it. Barry talked to Ask and here is there offical response from Patrick Crisp:
Like we did on Ask.com to improve the search experience, we are reducing the number of ads above our organic search results on the Ask.co.uk site. On Ask.co.uk, we are eliminating our Branded Response and the Answer Link products, showing only PPC listings as we do on Ask.com. Similar moves in the U.S. have resulted in an all-time high retention rate. As it does today, Ask.co.uk will continue to show Google Listings.Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings PPC product is going very well in the U.S., and we are focused on continuing to grow AJSL here before we expand internationally. While we believe the reduction in ad products will be great for our users, it has impacted our direct sales force only in the United Kingdom. We believe this will make Ask.co.uk an even stronger platform for advertisers to reach customers.
I do have to admit this is a pretty strange rumor, being that Ask just recently launched their PPC product back in August. Threadwatch reports a rumor/speculation from a source that says that Ask may discontinue there PPC program and has already started letting their sales team go.
So why would Ask want to discontinue there PPC program? One answer comes to mind, they are not discontinuing it in the US, but only in the UK. The other thought is that advertisers are not willing to pay a premium to be listed on Ask. Buying direct isn't all that it's crack up to be for advertisers possibly. I admit I have enjoyed testing out the program from the beginning but slowly got discouraged as CPC rates rose from affordable levels to those consistent with hyper competitive keywords in Google Adwords. I have scaled back my own campaign as it was no longer a good deal. Conversions were near or at levels from what I saw with Adwords. So why pay more when I could get an all in one solution buy using Adwords?
Then again, this is just pure speculation with no base for fact. It could just be a really misinformed source that let the news slip or the real deal? Barry reported back in August about the Ask Sponsered Listing program, which said that Ask was dropping some of their PPC ads because, "IAC understood organic results was the way to go, they have studies that show more users come back when they use the ask organic results. And they know the PPC ads were keeping users away." However, as "Google became a larger part of Ask's business, they had to keep adding more ppc ads." So whats a butler to do?
There are no forum threads I could find but here is some discussion about Ask Sponsored Listings on the forum currently - Digitalpoint - WMW - Cre8asite Forums