Ask.com Archives

Some more sad news for the struggling search engine, Ask.com. Ask is closing down Ask Japan, aka Ask.jp on June 25th.

Bill, the moderator of the Asia specific forums at WebmasterWorld explained that Ask.jp is "reorganizing to focus on B2B solutions. Their consumer search will cease operations on June 25." The consumer search product includes Ask.jp.

Google Translate can somewhat translate the statement:

From patronage, Ask.jp We very appreciate your business. This time, ask JEPI Dot Corporation, which specializes in business reorganization and corporate solutions, Services include: Search Ask.jp (www.ask.jp) will close.

[End] Target Service
June 25: Ask.jp (web search, blog search, product search, category search)

Ask debuted in Japan in August 2004.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night the news that Jim Safka, Ask.com's CEO for the past 16 months or so, has decided to step down from the role for personal reasons. What personal reasons?

"Jim has decided to move on from Ask.com, following the recent passing of his brother which has led him to re-evaluate his personal and professional priorities," Ask.com said in a prepared statement.

Scott Garell, who has been the President of Ask.com, will take his role. I first would like to send my condolences to Jim on his loss.

I have never been a fan of Safka's strategy for Ask.com, but he did do some good things for the company. I won't get into what I disliked about Safka now, it just isn't the time for that.

Safka took Jim Lanzone's CEO spot in January 2008. Prior to that, Jim Lanzone became the CEO in April 2006. I hope Scott does well at the spot, it is not an easy place to be.

You can read more coverage on this news at Techmeme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask has decided to bring Jeeves out of retirement, at least in the UK, and rebrand Ask.co.uk as Ask Jeeves UK. If you visit uk.ask.com you will see a question with the new Jeeves on the home page, that reads, "Why am I back?"

Glad you asked. The simple answer is I'm back to help.

I popped out three years ago to travel the world in a quest for knowledge and I've returned to Blighty armed with answers. During my sojourn research showed the public wanted me back, which I found jolly touching. And in that time the engineers toiled hard to make the site look better, work harder and be more personal...just like yours truly! I realise the questions are different now. Back in 2006 you wanted to know about spending money, now you want to know about saving it. That's why I've teamed up with TV's moneysaving expert Jasmine Birtles to bring you ten ways to save money, if I may. And don't forget to pop back and see me on the site throughout this week, I have some terrific prizes to give away!

Personally, I am delighted to see Jeeves come back. I have been really been giving the Ask management team a really hard time over the past year or two. But with this move, I am pretty happy with them. My major issue is that they only brought Jeeves to the UK (well, kind of). In the US, NASCAR is Ask.com's way of reaching America. In the UK, they are using Jeeves. I would love to see Jeeves come back to the US as well, and I believe that will eventually happen. In fact, we have dozens and dozens of comments on our Jeeves retirement post begging to bring back Jeeves, I know people miss the character.

Here is how Jeeves has transformed through the years:

Jeeves is more animated, more 3D now. It is suppose to show how the technology is better. I am not too sure about the technology being better, but I do like bringing back the character.

Most recently, I felt Ask.com crossed the line when they framed the search results. I also felt their technology is failing and they are not focused on core search. Those opinions have yet to change. But the Jeeves character, I am a fan of.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask.com has gone too far. I have given them a lot of negative attention recently but they deserve it all. They are now framing the landing page of the search results. Let me rephrase that... If you search at Ask.com, click on a listing, Ask.com will put the result in a frame, below their search results.

Here is a picture, notice the bar at the top:

Want to see it for yourself? Go to this URL to see.

At the top right, there is a little "X" icon that allows you to hide the bar and even "never show again." Here is a picture:

This is just so wrong and I am surprised I missed Pandia's coverage of this news on the 14th.

Searchers are not happy about this at WebmasterWorld. Robzilla said, "this annoys me as both a user and a webmaster, and overall just seems a little desperate." Senior member, skipfactor, accurately points out that the search ads are not framed in.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced together a new way to handle internal duplicate content issues with a new "canonical" header tag. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job explaining what it is all about in her piece at Search Engine Land.

So for all duplicate pages, you insert this tag in the header elements of those pages, specifying the main URL. The tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/true-url.html" />

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have detailed explanations of how they work.

Three main things:

(1) This works only internally, not across domains.
(2) Treat this like you would a 301 redirect, so be careful
(3) Search engines consider this a "hint" and do not have to abide by it (just yet)

Outside of that, there is good recaps on this at Techmeme.

We have a ton of Q&A on this from our live coverage of the Ask the Search Engines panel from SMX West. I am sure your questions are answered in that panel or in the discussions below.

This tag can be confusing, because it is new. But after webmasters begin to understand where, if and how to use it, they are more likely to love it.

JohnMu said in a forum post:

Here are some examples where this could be used: - Web-shops (mutliple URLs depending on how you got to a page) - Sites that work with Session-IDs within the URL - Ad-tracking URLs (eg using AdWords + Analytics) - Affiliate tracking URLs - News sites with multiple URLs per article - Forums with multiple URLs per thread/page (eg "&highlight=", etc)

Plus, Yoast already posted plugins to support this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Textex at WebmasterWorld is reporting that he is seeing both an Ask.com update and a Yahoo Search update.

He first noticed Yahoo Search changes yesterday afternoon, saying "Seeing movement." He was then backed up by full member, Vimes, who said, "I'm seeing something not sure if I'd call it an update just yet, the sectors i look at there is a shuffle." So this may be the beginning of a Yahoo update or it might be some sector tweaks. We are due a Yahoo update, the last one we noticed was back in November 2008, since then, there have been no confirmed Yahoo Search updates. So having an update now, would not surprise me.

On the Ask.com front, there is a bit more discussion going on, being that the update was reported at WebmasterWorld a bit earlier. Textex called this update "a complete overhaul." Full member, robzilla, confirmed but cautioned that this update doesn't seem to be "an improvement" to their index. Soon later, they both noticed that clearing their cookies reset the "results reverted back" to their previous state. This implies that the results might be a test on some users. I did some of my own testing and the results do seem a bit better. Still not what I consider "fresh" results, but a bit better on the few dozen results I check to see quality. This cannot have anything to do with Ask.com's recent announcement on NASCAR, so I wonder what exactly is going on here?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld on both Ask.com update and Yahoo Search update.

Want to know the hottest search terms across the various search engines? Yahoo, Ask, and Google [Product Search] have listed the most popular items. Here's what Yahoo has as its top 10 searches:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

And Ask.com's most popular list, on the contrary, doesn't seem that interesting (as some say):

1. Dictionary
2. MySpace
3. Google
4. YouTube
5. Facebook
6. Coupons
7. Cars
8. Craigslist
9. Online degrees
10. Credit score

Google's most popular searches are not available (yet?), but Google's most popular product searches are public:

1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

Surprised much? Some are.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

When Ask.com retired Jeeves, I was quite sad. The guy was a friendly web presence and he had the craziest answers to some of the funniest questions. But Jeeves retired, Ask.com essentially dissolved itself, and it looks like Jeeves is making a debut after playing around in the adult entertainment industry, as Barry reports at Search Engine Land.

Barry notes that if you go to askjeeves.com, it redirects to Ask.com but with the Jeeves character. On the other hand, if you just went directly to ask.com, Jeeves would no longer be seen.

It's about time Jeeves came back to us!

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has pretty sad reports about the current status of Ask.com's web search technology. The thread reports the following issues:

• Search results per page shift between 10 per page and go down to about 5 per page, depending on the page you are viewing.
• Many of the results for one-keyword search terms return results with a matching title tag, exactly - they call this a huge "page-title correlation."
• Many of those results are very outdated, even showing 404 not-found results.
• WebmasterWorld moderated added that many of the binoculars statistical results are outdated, slow or just don't work anymore.

The issue with WebmasterWorld is that you cannot post specific examples.

It is sad to me that whenever I report news or topics related to Ask.com these days, they are always negative.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In February 2006, Jeeves was retired by the folks at Ask.com. It was a sad experience, but it happened. Back then, the Ask blog thanked Jeeves for all his work and set up a special site at (WARNING, do not click this yet) www.jeevesretirement.com/desk/.

That website was devoted to Jeeves Retirement journal. What Jeeves, the fictional character, did while on his vacation, where he went, what he enjoyed, etc. Ask.com linked to this site from their home page, for a noticeable period of time, back then. Here is a picture:

I noticed via a comment left on this site, that Jeeve's retirement site is now a porn site. Yes, a pornographer picked up the domain when it expired, possibly two years after it was first set up.

So is Jeeves now a porn star?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you want to read my thoughts on Ask.com's relaunch, see what I wrote at Search Engine Land named Ask.com Goes Back To 1996 With New Release.

Today, I want to take you through some interesting observations from a WebmasterWorld thread. Let me quote you one piece from Swanson, an old time WebmasterWorld member from 2004:

I have it on good authority that the change has been requested by Google so that Ask can maintain a good quality score for it's arbitrage on Adwords.

I know it sounds like conspiracy theory but seriously this is a VERY good source.

You do know that Ask.com gets a huge amount of traffic from arbitrage on Adwords - it is as big a player as Ebay. Take away arbitrage and Ask.com is as big as Mirago.

The change? Dropping the 'complexity' of the 3D interface and offering less information on the page. Why would Ask want to remove information from the page? Yes, they say to make it easier for their users. But the argument above is suggesting to get more clicks on the Google Ads and thus earn more money. Yes, nothing to do with providing a better search experience, but rather more about better monetizing the pseudo search engine.

We know Ask.com is more about monetization than experience these days, so this theory is far from far fetched, in my opinion. I know I have a stigma about Ask.com, ever since they tore the soul out of Ask.com and our community reacted, but someone in this 'press' arena needs to speak beyond Ask.com's press release.

Think about it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in February, I spotted how Ask.com was showing up to five Google search ads above the organic search results. It only happened when using Internet Explorer on a PC, because (I guess here) the Ask.com team didn't want to upset the early adopters who use Firefox and Safari or a Mac.

Well, it now seems Ask.com is no longer shy or embarrassed about showing these ads. A search for mp3 players at Ask.com on any browser will show five Google search ads at the top of the organic results. Here is a picture:

Yes, it is even hard to distinguish between the background color of the ads and the organic results.

Back in mid-2005, Ask promised us to reduce the search ads in order to focus on relevancy and a better search experience. But that seemed to have gone out the window with Ask.com new Diller strategy.

It just seems to me that Ask.com is going backwards. Remember, back in December 2004, I asked Michael Palka in the Meet the Crawlers session at SES:

Q: I asked Ask Jeeves why they bury the Teoma results way under the Google AdWords results at Ask Jeeves?

A: Michael answered that is was not about not being more relevant, they feel Teoma is more relevant than AdWords. But it is set up that way from a monetization standspoint only. Fair answer.

Seems like we are back in 2004. Sad but true.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports Ask.com's crawler has seemed to slow down to a halt. Some webmasters are reporting zero crawling activity from Ask.com, while others are reporting extremely limited crawling activity.

WebmasterWorld moderator, jdMorgan, noticed the slow down to, he said:

I have noticed that they have dramatically slowed down their crawling on my sites, but they have not stopped.

Yes, this fuels me more on my write up named Sorry, Ask.com -- I Still Don't Think You're Focused On Core Search at Search Engine Land. Yea, Ask - is this a sign that you are giving up on the unstructured web? Let's just hope it is a temporary slow down that people are noticing. Honestly it would not surprise me if you guys gave up on crawling the unstructured web.

Also make sure to read my write up here named Search Community Reaction to Ask.com New Search Strategy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Our boss man Barry spoke with Jim Safka of Ask.com in a lengthy interview three weeks ago, and he's come out unimpressed by Ask.com's approach toward search. In the interview, Ask.com takes a stab at larger search engines (the big three) because he claims Ask.com is "smaller" (and can push things out quicker) and Safka also said that Ask "greatly over indexes in certain categories" (entertainment, health, hobbies, references). However, it seems from the conversation that Ask.com is not focused on the core algorithm.

"Have you or would you test Google organic search results in place of your organic results?," I asked. Jim initially gave me the PR speech consisting of, "we are completely devoted to our own search results." I then blatantly asked, "Is that a no?" He said it was a no and that no, Ask did not test Google results in the past six months.

Barry has admitted to Safka that core search is far from where it should be and it's not evolving as many of us are hoping for. He ends his article with "Ask Not What Is Best For Market Share, But What Is Best For Core Search." At least, that's what it should be for us. I'm not sure I am confident in Ask.com either at this point, and I know that I am not alone.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

We rarely ever hear of Ask.com updating their search index or algorithm. We rarely ever hear of Webmasters complaining or praising Ask.com about a recent change in the search results. But we have a solo post at WebmasterWorld from a member who has been there since 2002. The post says he has noticed a major change with Ask.com's search results.

WebmasterWorld paladin said:

Seeing some significant changes in the SERPs here. Most are positive for my sites which makes me a happy camper.

I have not seen any reports from any other forum on an Ask.com update. Also, the last time I reported about an Ask.com update was in October 2007.

I personally have been watching Ask.com over the last week or two for improvements in their index depth and freshness. I have been also testing that index for improvements in their query processor. The tests I have been running have continued to be very disappointing, to say the least. This comes after a year since announcing the Ask.com's new search technology, code named Edison.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday was Mother's Day and the search engines and search industry blogs/forums had special themes and logos up for the day. Here is a compilation of the logos I found:

Google:

Yahoo (Flash):

Dogpile:

Ask.com

Cre8asite Forums

Search Engine Roundtable

Plus today, Google has a special logo on Google.co.uk for Florence Nightingale:

To view last years Mother's Day logos from the search engine industry, click here. Also, Gary Price has his quick Mother's Day facts.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday afternoon I got word that IAC laid off 8% of the Ask.com workforce and I wrote a blog post named IAC Cuts 8% Of Ask.com & Kills Search Engine. Let me summarize what IAC told the press.

(1) They laid off 40 people, which was about 8% of Ask.com
(2) They are refocusing the search engine on women over 30
(3) They will be fine tuning the engine to answer questions on health and entertainment matters

That is what I got from what the IAC PR team was feeding the media.

I am not blind, we the search community are not blind, to many of us this means they killed the search engine.

If you are going to cut 8% of a tiny workforce, how do you expect to compete against Google or Yahoo or Microsoft - you can't. If you are going to focus your engine in a niche of searchers who are women over 30 who search on health and entertainment, how are you going to compete in the search space as an innovator - you won't. If you are going to alienate "digerati" or "West Coast elite" how are you going to compete against Google - you can't and won't.

Ask.com is no longer an innovator that is what this IAC announcement tells me. Ask.com is not to blame, it is obviously IAC who decided that although they were committed to a long term strategy in competing as a serious player in the search space - 1.5 years is long term enough for them and they have raised the white flag and said they are out.

Diller pulls the the soul out of Ask.com by removing Lanzone, he then pulls the smarts out of Ask.com by removing Gary Price and then pulls the will out of Ask.com by cutting 8% of the team. Heck, I even spotted early signs of Ask using Google search results, which I believe to be true.

Want to read a touching and heart-wrenching blog post from an Ask.com evangelist who feels betrayed? Go over and read Lisa Barone's post and see how many of the search community feels.

I’m heartbroken over the loss of an engine I loved and intensely angry at Barry Diller, the man who never understood the gem he had in his hand, and in return, threw it away when it wasn’t making money as fast as he wanted it to. This was a decision based on money, not about users, not about search, not about anything other than Barry Diller’s bottom line.

Danny Sullivan's post Obit: A West Coast Digerati Deadpools Ask.com at Search Engine Land tells Ask.com "you're dead." Danny does an excellent job showing us the reason he is the industry leader by going back to history and showing why Ask.com is truly now dead. Danny ends with this:

I won't cry for you much, Ask. I know you're in a different place now. I know what makes sense to me and many others doesn't make sense for you. But I hope you'll understand when I and the many others you've dismissed as the "digerati" aren't counting you in the search game any longer. That's because we know in our hearts you're gone, even if you protest that it's not so.

Let's dig into the community reaction. We have threads at Sphinn, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld and here are some select quotes from those threads:

The little search engine that could -- no more.

Now that quote makes me so upset, since I was behind Ask.com since 2004. I called them, and I believe I was the first to call them this, The Little Search Engine That Could.

This is such a shocker, I really had hope for Ask. It seemed like they had such a good product, they just had to hang in there - but finances aren't that forgiving.

I was really hoping that Ask would be the David that would slay Goliath (or at least make dent in Goliath's armor).

There is more but I will spare you. Here is a roundup of blog posts and news stories on the topic:

• All Things Must Pass; Moving On from Ask.com, Gary Price
• IAC's Ask.com to Cut 8% of Staff, Wall Street Journal
• IAC Cuts 8% Of Ask.com & Kills Search Engine, Search Engine Land
• Ask.com Cuts 40 Jobs, Gary Price Among Those Laid Off, Search Engine Journal
• Goodbye Ask.com: A Brand Evangelist Hangs It Up, BruceClay Blog
• Ask Laying off Workers, Search?, Marketing Pilgrim
• IAC Retooling Ask, Cutting 40, Silicon Valley Insider
• Ask.com Follows Jeeves Into Exile, WebProNews
• Ask.com search site to cut jobs, realign strategy, Reuters
• Ask.com to Cut 8%, Revamp Search Plans, Search Engine Watch
• Ask.com’s Safka: 40 Jobs Cuts; ‘Reevaluating’ Product; Ditching The ‘Digerati’, paidContent.org
• Ask.com: Innovation doesn’t always pan out, Between the Lines
• Ask.com Does About Face, Concentrates On Women, Profy
• Ask.com scales back in makeover, AP
• Ask.com to Become Women’s Site, Google Blogoscoped
• Ask Abandons General Search Engine Strategy, ResearchBuzz
• Ask.com to focus on narrower market, BigMouthMedia
• Apparently ASK Doesn't Always Have the Right Answer, StepForth
• RIP Ask.com?, Greg Sterling
• Ask.com is Dead, Metamend
• Obit: A West Coast Digerati Deadpools Ask.com, Search Engine Land

I plan on updating this post as I find more stories that I can add. Feel free to comment below with additional stories and I will try to add it to the main article.

I just found a Flickr stream of photos from Ask.com employees and ex-employees bidding farewell. Here is a Flickr slideshow of the people who have touched all of our hearts and that we will all miss deeply (including you Patrick). Update, I just found out these pictures are from two weeks ago, bidding farewell to Michael Ferguson who left Ask.com after working there since 1995.

Overall, I am extremely disappointed to say the least. This is the end of Ask.com, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Update: Added Danny's article above and also wanted to note that Barry Diller may be on his way out, too fitting.

A WebmasterWorld thread has one member spotting Google search results in the Ask.com web search results. textex, who has been a WebmasterWorld member since 2003 and I personally find to be a trusted forum informant said last night:

I am seeing Google results on Ask right now!

Unfortunately, he decided to quickly clear his cookies and reproduce the same results. When he cleared his cookies, he was no longer able to see it. He does not want to publicize the keyword phrase he used but he did say it did happen. I do believe him, even though the Ask.com PR team says it is not happening (not that I think they are lying, I just don't think they know.)

If you guys want to help out, please conduct some random searches on Ask.com and see if any of them match the Google search results. Make sure when searching in Google to be logged out and personalized search off. Also, when searching in Ask.com, I would test it in Internet Explorer on a PC. If you do see that the results match, please contact me at barry.schwartz AT gmail.com, attach a screen capture of the results, the browser type and version and your OS. I seriously want to have these cases documented if possible, it is one thing to go by someone's word and another thing to have a screen capture.

Why is this so important? Most of you know by now that IAC cut 8% of Ask.com and set out a new strategy for Ask.com, a strategy that in my opinion will kill the search engine as we know it today. I will write on this topic a little later, but removing Jim Lanzone, now Gary Price and 8% of Ask.com and then telling us they will focus on building out an engine for women who ask questions on health and entertainment - well - how can we take them as a serious Google competitor anymore, we can't.

Again, if you can please run some tests between Ask.com and Google and see if anything matches, it would be appreciated. This can be the first signs of proof that Ask.com is really thinking about dropping the search engine in favor for a lower cost syndication service with Google. This scenario is very possible, as paidContent.org suggests.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Here is my post on Ask.com's announcement: Search Community Reaction to Ask.com New Search Strategy.

Friday afternoon I reported at Search Engine Land on a Silicon Valley Insider report that IAC was going to force Ask.com to drop Teoma and the Teoma team and syndicate Google's search service. They would either sell of Teoma or drop the whole thing in favor for Google's search service.

The tip came from a solid source, said Silicon Valley Insider. However, Reuters said this is not the case and they heard otherwise. I personally sent in a request with Ask.com's PR team and have heard nothing back since Friday - is it too much to decline this is happening?

In any event, I feel long time supports of Ask.com are now losing patience. Not on a financial level, like Diller and company are but on a social level. The little engine that could seems to not be trying anymore. By adding more ads above the organic results, it seems like Ask.com is going back to the Jeeves days.

Scanning the forum threads at Sphinn, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld and seeing posts like these:

Glad I sold my IACI stock last month.

I've always had a great affection for Ask/Teoma for its technical competence. Unfortunately they have not been the focus of the accountant-based IAC money machine. So it's not surprising to see this happening. If only the money-making machine worked as well as the Ask/Teoma engine.

It just makes me feel that the grassroot'ers, us, who have been supporting Ask.com through thick and thin are now giving up. Do I blame anyone? No. Diller removed the soul of Ask.com a couple months back and where does that leave Ask? I always thought Diller came in to invest for several years, understanding it would not be cheap. But I guess the pressure got to him and he needs to make changes now, even though Diller said himself, and I quote our SES Keynote coverage:

You need to think about the long run. Google doesn't spend a nickel on marketing. Barry said we will not leave it by word of mouth. Ask is coming in after the category has been popularized. So they need to do every single thing they can think of to market Ask. But the bottom line is the differentiated features. Ask is concentrating on everyday search, whereas others are working on different products. People are going to say, yes I will use it or not.

Will Ask.com stop focusing on search and just became a syndication service. I still hope not, but I hope less these days.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Postscript: Ask.com got back to me on Monday saying these rumors are false. They said that the "bottom line" is that the rumors are "just flat-out not true." Adding that "our Teoma technology will continue to power search engine results on Ask.com. That's really all there is to it."

Personally, I still think there is something to the rumors.

Barry has posted at Search Engine Land that Ask.com is adding Compete stats to its Binocular site preview feature.

When you perform a search, you see binoculars on the side of the page which shows a page preview. The second tab is your Compete statistics. An example screenshot is shown below:

Very interesting -- and very cool for Ask and Compete.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google & Yahoo typically do not show off any special logo for President's Day, which is today. But Ask.com and Dogpile are both showing off special logos and themes for the day.

Here is Ask.com:

Yes, that is Mount Rushmore - more details at ask.com/web?q=Rushmore.

And DogPile goes cute again:

Got to love DogPile!

Update: Here is our theme:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

On January 7th, we asked you to vote on the most improved PPC program of 2007. Your votes are now all in and I wanted to share the 76 responses.

Overall, most of you felt Yahoo Search Marketing was the most improved PPC program of 2007. Yahoo launched Panama, the code name of their new PPC program, in October 2006 but really didn't start having Overture account (the old PPC system) migrated for a few months after that. Yahoo, in 2007, began also migrating the new system worldwide. Yahoo's new PPC system is a total overhaul of the old Overture system, and that is why most feel it is the most improved.

Here are the raw results:

As you can see, Google came in a fairly close second. Google has made several significant upgrades to their AdWords system, including dozens of quality score updates, smart pricing, demographic bidding and much much more.

Thank you for taking the poll.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ask.com announced the launch of a feature I have been waiting for since Ask 3D launched. You can now upload your own "skins" to be used as your personal background for the Ask.com home page.

The Ask.com Blog explains exactly how to do it, so follow the directions there.

Here is my theme:

Very cool!

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Vunet.com reports that Ask.com has hired a former Google executive, Cesar Mascaraque, as the company's new European managing director.

In a statement, Mascaraque said that he's very excited to join as Ask is the fastest growing search engine.

Forum members, obviously, have a problem with that perception, as Hitwise shows that Ask.com shares haven't grown significantly over the past few months. Perhaps, though, things are about t change.

Mascaraque was also quoted as saying "I have watched the brand set itself apart from competitors by pioneering new products and offering innovative ways of bringing search to users."

And a forum member agrees with that sentiment:

Ask does have an interesting media blitz going on and have been for the past 12 months or so. Between the Unibomber Billboards and the TV Commercials, the Ask Brand is getting out there.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last night I reported Jim Safka To Replace Jim Lanzone As CEO Of Ask.com at Search Engine Land. In short, Jim Lanzone, who became Ask.com's CEO in August of 2006, to step up when Steve Berkowitz left to go to Microsoft, has been replaced by one of Diller's guys, Jim Safka. I hear very good things about Safka, he was previously the CEO of Match.com and he will retain his job at as CEO of Primal Ventures.

But the SEO/SEM community was a bit taken back by the shocking news. Jim Lanzone has been such an important part of Ask.com, since joining in the company in 2001 as Vice President of Product Management. He drove and lead the company for a long time. But more importantly, Jim Lanzone had a special connection with the SEM community, a connection that I feel no other CEO at any other search engine company had.

Barry Diller said it himself:

Jim Lanzone was the principal executive responsible for Ask.com's turnaround over the last two years. His passion for innovation and his every day dedication to the business and its people have been everything anyone could ask for. He is a superb executive and leader and I'm hopeful we can be associated in the future.

I don't know who left who. I just can't see Jim Lanzone leaving Ask, I just can't see it. It is just a shame.

A Sphinn thread shares some of the thoughts we had about Jim Lanzone and how much we will miss him. I personally felt he was the soul of Ask.com and accounted for a lot of the soul of the search industry.

Lisa Barone said:

He brought an amazing amount of energy and excitement to my favorite little search engine. It was always fun to see his face light up when you got him talking about what Ask was up to or their latest round of TV commercials.

More on those commercials over here.

Barry Welford said:

Oh dear. I hoped that Diller was focusing on ASK since I thing that is the sole horse that should drive the IAC growth. The quote from the article isn't at all encouraging:

In his statement, Diller said: "These changes are intended to strengthen and streamline the operating structure at IAC, both leading up to our intended spin-offs, and beyond."

Giving the glowing description of Jim Lanzone given by Diller, this presumably means there was a fundamental difference on strategic thinking here. That really upsets me. I was seeing ASK as the David to Google's Goliath.

Yes, it scares me too. Will Diller start cutting costs and just try to monetize the engine, leaving relevancy to Google and others?

Kevin Heisler said:

Lanzone deserves Diller's kudos. He launched the blended search innovations that have transformed the industry.

Jim - we wish you much success in your new ventures. You will always be missed and we hope you stay connected with us in the search industry. We know that your new position as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Venture Capital firm, Redpoint Ventures may lead to you coming back into the search space - and that give us all hope!

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

According to numerous reports, including a post at Search Engine Land, if you've advertised on Ask.com between August 2005 and now, you're entitled to reimbursement for any suspected invalid clicks. Those who are entitled to the settlement money will be getting it in the form of advertising (no checks or cash, sorry!)

If you've been affected, your claim must be submitted by February 2, 2008.

A website has been set up for more information about filing the claim. A lot of people find the poor writing style on the site "super fishy," so if it helps, perhaps you'd be interested in reading the legal note that Scott Hendison posted on his blog.

This isn't a new thing for search engines. Google did the same thing in 2006, and so did Yahoo a few months later.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this week, we reported that Ask.com Crawler Inserting Url-Encoded Spaces in URLs Causing 404 Errors. In short, Ask.com's crawlers were crawling badly formed URLs, causing tons of 404 errors in web server log files.

Vivek Pathak, Ask.com's Infrastructure Product Manager, replied to the WebmasterWorld thread saying Ask.com has fixed the issue.

We did experience a data error which caused us to crawl badly-formed urls from a small number of sites. We identified the issue and corrected it on Dec 29th. Thanks for flagging and please let us know if you see any further problems.

Webmasters in the forum have confirmed that they are no longer seeing 404 errors produced by Ask.com's spiders (Teoma).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting several webmasters noticing that Ask.com's crawler has recently been generating tons of 404 (file not found) errors on their sites. The issue appears to stem from Ask.com auto inserting URL-Encoded spaces into the URL. URL-encoded spaces are those %20 signs you may find in URLs.

The specific crawler called out is crawler100.ask.com. Reports say that this has been going on for two weeks now.

Forum moderator, jdMorgan, offered up a mod_rewrite technique to force the Ask.com bot to obtain the correct URL and not a %20 URL. So if you are noticing this issue as well, check out the thread and try implementing jdMorgan's solution.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I wrote a long post on the launch of AskEraser at Search Engine Land, titled, Ask.com Launches AskEraser Giving Searches Ability To Search Anonymously. But honestly, if you think about it, AskEraser does not erase data, it is a bad name.

AskEraser just prevents data from being written to Ask.com's servers. It is not like data is being written and then Ask is erasing the data. It is simply not being written in the first place. So maybe Ask.com should rename the tool to something else?

Anyway, if you go to Ask.com, you should see a link to AskEraser. When activated, it won't store data such as IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete query text in their databases, cookies or log files for that search. If you turn it off, it will store that data. If you turn it on, you won't get Ask personalized results.

Here is what it looks like:

The FAQ is at this page and again, I have a large walk through at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been watching a thread started by Barry W. at Cre8asite forums named Blogsearch, Google's Neglected Property back about a month or so ago. Since then, I have been trying to find a good blog search engine to use on a daily basis.

Personally and professionally, I dropped all my subscriptions to blog search engine searches. The results were 95% spam and simply wasted my time. I stuck with RSS News searches and that worked for me. But I was pretty sure I was missing something by not being 100% plugged into the blogosphere. So that thread at Cre8asite Forums sprung my interest.

Recently Read/Write Web asked So Which Blog Search Engine Do You Use? and I saw Steve Rubel twit that he uses "Bloglines/Ask a lot" for blog search. So I have been giving it a try and so has Barry W.

A new Cre8asite Forums thread has early positive feedback from folks. I have resubscribed to my RSS searches to the blogosphere and I feel more plugged in. The results are actually fairly good and I don't feel like I am wasting my time with blog search anymore. Barry W. said:

I'm really finding it excellent. For any item found you can immediately subscribe to the RSS feed or you can post it to some of the more popular social media sites.

So why not give Ask.com blog search a deeper try?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Forum members are noticing a bit of a change in terms of presentation for Google Local results. One member was a bit disgruntled by the results presented when he performed a local search and found 10 links -- without the necessary map:

I am no longer seening a map and now I get the "top ten local results" instead of the 3 links and the map.

That observation piqued another response from someone who watches TV:

I have seen some commercials for Ask and think that Google needs to do more

(Really, now, beyond watching the tube, you should also be using Ask.com. Their local results rock!)

I can't reproduce the 10-link result and still see the standard map plus three links, but my guess is that Google is testing this feature out and looking for feedback. There's your feedback, Google. I still say that Ask.com works pretty darn well on the local front, though.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

IAC, the parent company of Ask.com, is breaking up into 5 different publicly traded companies: IAC (which will include Ask, Bloglines, and a number of other web properties), HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval International, and LendingTree.

And so Ask.com will now stand a little more on its own, but it can't be completely without IAC since Ask.com helped IAC get a 40% increase of media revenue in Q3 of 2007.

Forum members find this interesting. Now, there is more of a focus within the five groups:

Interesting change. They had assembled a wide ranging hodge podge of companies with very few synergies amongst them.

But 5 publicly traded companies? That's a lot to keep track of, another says.

Ask.com, therefore, is not completely on its own, but now IAC can focus its energy on making Ask even better. And we love that.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports seeing a small Ask.com algorithm and index update.

I personally took a look at my traffic for this site and compared this past week to the week before and saw a 30%+ increase in search traffic from Ask.com. Does that mean there was an update? Not necessarily. But there seems to be some suggestions of some type of update over at Ask.com.

The last time we reported an Ask.com update was in August.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread mentions noticing the new Ask.com "Instant Getification" commercials that start of with a message that reads, "Can Your Search Engine Do This?"

First, let's all watch one of the commercials:

As you can see, they are simple and show a compare and contrast between a "typical" search engine and what Ask.com can offer.

I personally like the commercials, but a WebmasterWorld thread has a member who feels Ask.com is knocking on Google.

The new ad shows someone searching for music and looks like you can demo songs / see popular tracks and also a mouse over preview etc.

Then it shows google serps (looking bland) with no sound or anything and goes "Does yours do this?"

I would think google would have something to say about that.

Technically, they are not showing Google's search results, they are showing a white labeled engine. I am with martinibuster, who said:

Those were great ads. I loved it. Ask made it's point elegantly. Reminded me of the Apple ads, except it wasn't exagerrated nor featured smug people.

Good job on your ads Ask.com! We asked in the past, Is Ask.com's "The Algorithm" Campaign Really Working? I hope these do.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan is back in the US for a bunch of SMX conferences, and in California, he spotted this very ironic sight:

Forum members are cracking up:

It is a Huge Google Billboard over a tiny ask.com billboard!

Thanks, Danny, for the laugh. :)

(Others, however, just don't get the Ask.com billboard at all. The comments on the Digg submission if you sort by most Diggs reflect that sentiment.)

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A brand new beta version of Bloglines has been launched this week, and it features a great amount of AJAX and customization features.

The key features in this new beta include:

A Customizable Start Page: You can now drag and drop desired pages to your start page so that you can get a quick glance of the stories from your favorite feeds.

When you mouse over a particular title on your feed, you can see an excerpt of the feed or summary.

Three different viewing options: You now can view your feeds in a standard full feed view, which the old Bloglines version is based off. You can also view only headlines in quick feed view, or you can view the feeds in a three-pane view which combines full feeds and quick feeds in a split pane.

Here's the standard full-feed view that most of us are used to:

But here's a quick feed view which looks very similar to the customized start page. However, this is only for a particular folder that I have selected.

This is what it looks like when you opt-in for a 3-pane view. It kind of reminds me of the way I set up my email.

I like it.

Drag and Drop Feeds for Easy Organization. And finally, for someone like me who subscribes to over 180 feeds, a drag and drop feature is available so that I can organize my feeds better. I really needed this and now it's here.

So far, the direction of Bloglines is promising. The only caveat forum members and I have noticed noticed is that it's not easy anymore to mark feeds as read unless you mouseover them or scroll into the blogs. I can see that being an issue that the Ask team will address, however, so let's give it some time. :)

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

The Times Online in the UK interviewed Jim Lanzone, chief executive of Ask.com. Asked about Google, Lanzone has an interesting reaction to his competition.

Instead, asked what it's like taking on the most formidable website on the planet, he breaks into the grin for which West Coast entrepreneurs are famed, and says: "I think it's tasty."

Meanwhile, he's still working to build up the Ask.com brand.

We have over 50 million users worldwide. We're one of the top web properties. It would be a mistake for us to say we want ten out of ten Google users to switch over. One in ten would be a good start, though. ... We think there will be a slice that prefer the Ask experience.

You've got to hand it to him. He's in a difficult place. WebmasterWorld members think so too.

Lanzone is selling a turkey; nothing wrong with that, except that he's standing at the caviar counter.

In fact, reading the whole interview, I'm not convinced he's on the same planet as the rest of us.

A brave man; Good Luck to him.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are some reports via WebmasterWorld that Ask.com has completed some type of search update.

It is hard to tell for sure, since the volume of traffic received from Ask.com is typically low. So any increases and decreases, percentage-wise, can be huge.

I reviewed a few of my sites and did see spikes up or down via Ask.com from this week to last week.

One member said:

Been watching movement with ask.com for the last couple of days and my sites been getting progressivly worse as the days move on..

The Ask serps have been before the update very stable and constant.. Yesterday and Today not so much..

But as I said, it is hard to know for sure, like with a Google or Yahoo update.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I wrote how Is Ask.com's "The Algorithm" Campaign Really Working? I then submitting it to Digg, and it later became "popular". My goal was to see if Digg users were also confused by the campaign, as confused as my brother-in-law and as confused as some of the search marketers at Cre8asite Forums.

The discussion echoed the findings in the Cre8asite Forums. Many, unfortunately, are confused about how this marketing campaign promotes the awareness of their brand.

- 27 Digg Respondents (who actually associated the "algorithm" campaign with a brand)
- 20 associated "the algorithm" campaign with Google
- 6 associated it with Ask.com
- 1 associated it with eBay

Percentage of Digg Users Thought "The Algorithm" campaign was from:

It is important to note that campaigns like this need time to seed. It is probably Ask.com's goal to keep these campaigns going so that in the future, the seeds will sprout and The Algorithm will be considered Ask.com's. That seems to be the plan, but only time will tell. This also only reflects the Digg market and does not reflect normal people who work in schools, in doctor offices, legal offices and so on.

You can see additional comments at Digg and Cre8asite Forums.

My brother-in-law, who is extremely technology savvy, stopped me and said, he thought the commercials were for Google. I looked at him with concern and asked him to repeat that. He said it again, he thought those were Google commercials. He said, when he thinks of the word "algorithm," he thinks of Google. I was taken back and thought, wait a second, maybe other people think the same thing.

So I started a thread at Cre8asite Forums and received some trusted and useful feedback on the topic.

Softplus, an active SEM forum member in several forums, said:

In the beginning, it confused me as well

Google is constantly doing something with it's "algorithm". It even ranks #4 for "algorithm" (on Google).

Getting a "new" company associated with a term like that is going to be a long, hard journey....

Cre8asite Forum Moderator, Ruud added:

I'm convinced others are thinking the same. When we just had the "x hates the algorithm" stuff I was thinking they were kicking Google. "The algorithm is bad but we at Ask will do..."

The algorithm = Google.

I'm not sure how the TV spots would be viewed but your friend's reaction doesn't surprise me. Those around me who are not that computer savy do relate the word algorithm to Google... Go figure.

EGOL, moderator as well:

"Ask the Algorithm".... means... SEARCH GOOGLE.

Ask.com has two problems... lack of brand awareness... and because they have lack of brand awareness, a much stronger brand such as Google can usurp the word ASK right out of their commercial.

The feedback in the forum continues, it is overwhelming and all dead on.

Ask.com cannot get out of the shadow of Jeeves. Many miss the character, many miss the personality and many miss what it stands for. If searchers want an "algorithm," they will go to Google. I know Ask.com wants to change all that, but is it too late?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

With all the new buzz around Ask.com and their campaigns, TV commercials and new user interface, a WebmasterWorld thread and Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread decided to take a look at a fundamental issue with their indexer.

Robert Charlton, WebmasterWorld moderator, noted that Ask.com is still indexing pages that have been 301 redirected (permanent redirect) over three years ago.

They are still indexing pages that were 301 redirected three years ago, redirects which have been followed by every other search engine in the known universe.

He is not the only person noticing this. I personally see it on several sites. But let's pull some more feedback from the forum thread.

Yes, I see this on a site that I 301'd over a year ago.. They still have about 1,700 pages from it actually. I'm concerned about this possibly causing duplicate content penalties with the site that it 301s to, which is currently delisted.

Yes. I can confirm more than a few instances of old URIs still appearing in the Ask index. Stuff from more than a year ago. I don't want to dig any further for fear of what I may find. ;)

Same for me, ask.com still shows (and ranks well) an address I 301'd more than FIVE years ago. I still have the 301 in place, for this reason (and for other old links).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Ask.com has relaunched their search engine last night to "provide people with a faster, easier, and richer search experience."

Ask.com has decided to use the three pane interface and many of the features from the Ask X interface.

Here is the home page of Ask.com with the polka dots skin.

It is refreshing. When I began typing a query, vanity search, it offered search suggestions.

You can also customize your skin by clicking on the "Skins" link.

And here is the three pane view, with search box on left, results in middle and vertical search items on right.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land has a detailed write up and so does Gary Price at ResourceShelf of all the features of the news Ask.com.

Will it make a difference? That is the current SEO/SEM discussion in the forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

First signs on "The Algorithm" came when Edison was leaked at SES NY from Apostolos Gerasoulis, the co-founder of Ask.com's technologies. Edison is the code name of the new algorithm, more on how that works here.

Since then, Ask.com has launched many local campaigns to generate buzz about "the algorithm." Some of those campaigns are a bit controversial. The goal, in my opinion, is to generate buzz around the phrase "the algorithm." Ask.com's CEO, Jim Lanzone, has gone on the record saying that they want the word "algorithm" to be a cool word.

A forum thread at Cre8asite Forum is still chugging away, I added that there has been a lot more discussion on Ask.com since they launched these controversial billboards and posters.

You know, the "no publicity is bad publicity" concept.

Now that Ask.com is backing these billboards on the algorithm with these new TV spots, that are both tasteful and cool, I think it may just help a bit. At least I hope so. Hey, I still am for the underdog and have been for a while. Check out my Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could from 2004.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I have been reporting about the Ask.com Algorithm campaign at Search Engine Land for a couple months now. You can read some of my coverage at Now Starring: The Algorithm - Ask.com To Focus On Ranking System In New TV Ads, Ask.com: The $100 Million Brand and some other Ask.com promotions here.

I am sure you have seen some of these ads yourself. But one of the ads being discussed is the ad named "The Unabomber Hates The Algorithm." The ad looks like this:

A Cre8asite Forums thread has one member calling the ad disgusting.

This latest one "The Unabomber Hates the Algorithm"....what is the deal with this?

The Unabomber killed 3 people and wounded more than 20 others. This is what Ask is now using as a marketing ploy? I'm totally disgusted. Beyond this just not making sense, (am I supposed to say, well if a murderer hates it, then I, a good person, will like it????) it's making me think Ask is being run by a bunch of nut cases. Seriously. Will we soon be seeing H****r featured in one of these things? Some things just aren't joke material...and I honestly don't know if this is supposed to be a joke, or clever, or weird, or thought-provoking, or brain washing or what.

He then asks, why was the on YouTube? YouTube is a Google owned property and why would Google allow competitors to advertiser on their property?

There are answers for all these questions but let's leave it to the forums.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This article was written Tuesday and scheduled to go live today.

According to a DigitalPoint Forums thread, Sergey Brin has married Anne Wojcici in the Bahamas last weekend. The scoop has been covered at ValleyWag.

In similar news, Barry attended the wedding of Gary Price and Lisa Cohen last weekend as well. The Ask.com blog has more.

From the writers at Search Engine Roundtable, Mazel Tov to Sergey and Anne and to Gary and Lisa!

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread asks a good question, does rotating the content on a page hurt your search rankings.

You need to break this question down into how much content is being rotated in and out. If the whole page changes dynamically all the time, then it may cause a problem. If there are sections on the page that change on refresh, then it may not cause a problem. If the content on the page changes throughout the day, like a news site, then it wont cause much of an issue at all.

The big thing here, in my opinion, is to keep users in mind. Will it confuse your users to have the content changing all the time?

Imagine an e-commerce site with featured products on the home page. You can implement the featured products to dynamically rotate based on page load or you can cache the featured products to remain constant for a certain time period. If a shopper comes to your site and likes a featured product but then comes back and can't find it, it can be an issue.

On news sites or blogs, users understand that new content is added often. So users know what will be on the home page today, may not be on the home page tomorrow. Same with sites designed specifically to change on reload, like the Hot or Not web site (great viral site).

WebmasterWorld moderator, caveman, has a nice response:

There are lots of factors here that we don't have precise information on, but that's OK, because there is also a fair amount of existing knowledge out there about sites that constantly change content on the homepage, and for the most part, it just isn't a problem. IMO, Quadrille's point that this won't help in terms of strict SEO, is a legitimate one, but I never look at SEO anymore in that tight a context.

The reality is the the dominant search engine uses a very links based algo (they all do, really), so while I am a big believer in on-page optimization still mattering, let's get this in perspective...

The title of the page (most important onpage element) is presumably not changing, nor are important subheads, high level page text, and important site nav elements. If those things are not present, they probably should be (especially in this case). If those constant elements are present, and considering the importance of backlinks, the SE's have more than enough info to effectively rank the page.

Further discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread tells the perfect story of someone who wants a page they own to be removed from the search engines.

One of my clients is an attorney and all of his partners have their own biography page on his website. One of the partners just left the firm and I removed her file from the server.

Now when her name shows up in the SE's, it's linked to a 404 error page I created, "Page cannot be found..."

My client doesn't want her name showing up at all in the SE's with a link to his website, even if it's to an error page.

With Google or Yahoo, there are ways to expedite the removal of the cache page and URL from the search engine. Recently, Google announced a new way to remove content from Google. You basically login to your verified Google Webmaster Central account and use the remove page tool. Yahoo also has a delete URL feature that allows verified site owners to remove URLs from their search index.

But the problem here is that this specific client, in the example above, wants the page removed from MSN Search. Microsoft has not given us a way to expedite the removal of a page or the cache results. Nor has Ask.com.

So what can a person do?

Softplus in the forums offers some suggestions:

(1) 404 the page, but that may take a pretty long time to impact the search results.
(2) Just change the content of that page and the next time Mr. Spider comes to crawl the page, the cache will be updated and the content you want removed will be gone.
(3) 301 the page to a different but related page.

Here are some other ideas:
- Block the page using a robots.txt command
- Add the nocache tag to the page

I personally think option two might be the quickest method outside of using a tool to remove the page, which is not offered by Microsoft of Ask.com.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google might have the highest market share, the most visitors, and is the most powerful brand of 2007, but the other search engines happen to exist for a reason: they satisfy the needs of users. A WebmasterWorld member actually finds Ask, which is the weakest of the four at the present, to be the best search engine. His claim is that "it produces much better results." Furthermore, to its credit, "Ask is naturally more difficult to game, and no Ask rep has needed to ask webmasters to rat on their colleagues - because it hasn't needed to."

Good observation. But his post went unanswered for several days until someone pointed out that while Ask does show promise, they have other issues: "poor spidering [and] very low caching ability." Worse, "their complete absense here on webmasters world, their refusal to engage with webmasters, plus the lack of referals does mean no one hearabouts gets excited about ask."

Another member has similar findings, especially after reviewing his server logs:

In my case, I can easily see that Ask/Teoma bot keeps asking for non-existing, deprecated URLs, which have been superseded over 2.5yr ago.

For some reason, Ask/Teoma bot is very slow to spider new pages, readily crawlable from the site's linking structure (or by consulting the sitemap.xml new standard), with deeplinks from other sites. Instead, many of its requests end up 404s (i.e. waste of resources, both its own and ours).

These observations do not boost my confidence in Ask's ability to find relevant content.

But there's more. Andy Hagans writes a blog post urging Ask (and Microsoft) to respect users' privacy. He considers it a "business opportunity" if the smaller engines would become a "privacy engine," so that user results are not stored for more than 2 weeks/2 months.

At a certain point, search relevancy is a relative commodity (is Google really that much better than is was a year ago?), and other priorities are going to determine where searchers hang their hats. For millions of searchers out there, the overriding “other priority” is privacy.

Hey, I hear you, Andy.

In 2004, Barry also reported about Ask.com as a search engine that shows a terrific amount of potential. Still, they could do so much more if they engage in the community. I think that would be a wonderful thing.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I was prepped two days ago for a Search Engine Land post that announced Ask.com To Launch Contextual Advertising Product. In short, Ask.com's Search Listings division is launching a contextual product to compete with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and Microsoft contentAds. Ask.com's program is named ASL Contextual Advertising and will go live the week of May 21st on IAC's properties.

I honestly have no idea when individual publishers will be able to apply to join the Ask.com Contextual program, but as soon as I know, I will let you know.

The Ask.com blog posted a couple screen captures showing off a sample ad. Here is one of those ads:

How is this product different from our competitors, you ask? Three important reasons, each one a paradigm shift:

* It gives publishers more control over yield and relevancy
* It gives publishers more creative ad unit opportunities
* It allows both advertisers and publishers more control over where and what ads are displayed

DigitalPoint Forums has a pretty long thread on this announcement. They are extremely excited for a competitor to enter the market, outside of Yahoo and Google. Time will tell when they launch it to these publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Ask.com, Google and Yahoo! all sported logos for Earth Day yesterday. I did not see special logos at Live.com or even Dogpile (but I may have missed them). Here they are:

Ask.com redid their home page:

Google went cold with their logo:

Yahoo! had this cute animation, which I took a screen cast of and put on YouTube. The video is pretty stretched out, so please keep that in mind.

Here is the Flash file from Yahoo (they may move the file off the server in the future):

Last year's Earth Day designs can be found here and 2005 over here, and Google's 2004 here.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com To All Support Sitemaps Autodiscovery. So how do you ping these services to notify the search engines of an update to your Sitemaps, if you do not want to wait for them to find it themselves?

Softplus at Cre8asite Forums posted the URLs you can use to ping the various engines. Here they are:

Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

I did not test these myself, but they seem accurate.

Note, there is no URL listed for Microsoft's Live search. Why? I suspect they currently do not support Sitemaps. Which brings me back to my lingering question, Is Microsoft's Live Search Ever Going to Add Sitemaps Support? They have been promising it since November 15, 2006.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Ask.com is set to launch a new search algorithm code named Edison. The new algorithm will combine Teoma and Direct Hit, two search engine technologies that Ask.com purchased a few years back, to bring about a new algorithm, Edison.

I was reviewing the social search panel where Apostolos Gerasoulis, co-founded Teoma Technologies, know own by Ask.com. Apostolos has leaked this information in that panel.

I have confirmed the existence of Edison with Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com. Jim was not able to give me any more comments or details on Edison.

So I decided to meet with Apostolos Gerasoulis this morning, and I received some more information about Edison. Here is what I got for you.

(1) Direct Hit and Teoma were the original social search engines.
- Direct Hit which was purchased back in 1999 by Ask, uses click data to determine relevancy for rank. So the more clicks, the higher the click popularity, the higher a page would rank.
- Teoma uses hubs and authorities to determine relevancy. In a sense, it uses the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine relevancy and show the best results they can.

(2) Apostolos explained in his presentation this morning that they will be combining the best of both Direct Hit and Teoma into one engine.

(3) Apostolos also explained that they have been tagging for three plus years. So for example, if you do a search at Ask.com, that search query you used, will be associated with the pages you click on Ask.com. So if you search on "cars" and click on the first result, the first result will be tagged as "cars" behind the scenes.

It is my understanding, the new Ask.com search algorithm, code named Edison, will consist of these three components and more.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Update: Ask.com issued a statement which I posted at Search Engine Land. I also wonder if it is named Edison because that is where AG lives and works.

Great news from yesterday at SES. Danny has a great roundup describing that Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery at Search Engine Land and I have some more details with my coverage of the Sitemaps & URL Submission session from yesterday.

In short, all four major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com and Ask.com will all support an autodiscovery method for Sitemaps. Sitemaps is an XML protocol that enables you to freely submit a listing of URLs with more meta-data to the search engines, so that the engines can be assisted in their crawl process. It is like a form of paid inclusion without paying.

Sitemaps was first introduced in November 2006 but back then you had to manually go to Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo Site Explorer and inform them about your sitemap. Now, all you need to do is put a little marker in your robots.txt file, telling the search engines the location of your sitemap and presto, the search engines will find it on their own.

Microsoft and Ask.com both promised to support it, but I believe are currently not supporting it yet.

More details on these bot sitemaps (not human sitemaps) at sitemaps.org.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums member references a Google Groups thread that suspects that Ask.com is trying to promote its search engine by running AdWords campaigns on Google for a user's own business.

On Cre8asite, the member says:

Ask.com is paying "partners" for visitors that click on a tagged link to a search query - I don't know about you, but that's just asking for abuse (link-spam bonanza)...

The Google Groups member is not at all too happy that his business searches are being subverted by Ask.com:

www.Ask.com are using our company name on www.Google.com in an ad that directs to www.Ask.com. When this ad is clicked on, it goes to the www.Ask.com search engine where searches for the keyword 'silverstall' appear. The adword was evidently taken out by their affiliate marketing company which is behind the recent 'information revolution' corporate advertising masquerading as a social movement. In our area it has totally backfired with the local students union, who witnessed yesterdays fracas, warning students not to use 'ask'. We have warned Ask that we will publish the security videos of yesterdays harrassment on the net and i've a feeling that we will be left alone from now on.

Another user echoes this sentiment:

I read how a cafe window was kicked in when they refused to allow Ask.com posters being handed out so you are not alone Silverstall in experiencing the atrocious behavior of a campaign that is going down as one of the biggest marketing blunders of the year.

Danny wrote in just a few days ago on Search Engine Land about the Wall Street Journal coverage of this campaign. The end result seems pretty negative, with one user feeling that an "inferior search engine" is misleading the masses.

We've seen Ask.com advertise on Google many times. Are the aggressive marketing campaigns of Ask.com in the UK ethical? Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Google Groups.

There is no doubt that a ton of bot activity on one's sites are from rogue spiders. Spider or bots that pretend to be legit bots but are there to steal your content. We have covered several sessions on this in the past; here are some:

• The Bot Obedience Course - August 8, 2006
• The Bot Obedience Course - December 5, 2006
• Scrape Bots Vs. Search Bots :: Fighting the Battle - September 12, 2006
• Spider and DOS Defense - Rebels, Renegades, and Rogues - November 16, 2006

Matt Cutts posted a detailed How to verify Googlebot back at the Webmaster Central Blog on 9/20/2006 explaining how to do reverse DNS and then a forward DNS->IP lookup.

Telling webmasters to use DNS to verify on a case-by-case basis seems like the best way to go. I think the recommended technique would be to do a reverse DNS lookup, verify that the name is in the googlebot.com domain, and then do a corresponding forward DNS->IP lookup using that googlebot.com name; eg:

> host 66.249.66.1
1.66.249.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com.

> host crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com
crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com has address 66.249.66.1

I don't think just doing a reverse DNS lookup is sufficient, because a spoofer could set up reverse DNS to point to crawl-a-b-c-d.googlebot.com.

Of course there are some ways to automate this. Either code it yourself, buy CrawlWall or implement a solution similar to Ekstreme's PHP Search Engine Bot Authentication.

Rogue spiders are no fun, as we have seen in cases with some forums.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Senior Member, Billy, at WebmasterWorld has a solo post asking if anyone else noticed a shift in traffic from Ask.com.

Seems to me that Ask underwent a recent update. My traffic just about doubled. Anyone else seeing anything.

I have not seen any other posts out there on this. Nor have I noticed specific changes with this specific site.

But I looked at some of my clients sites and as of Thursday, it appears they have seen an increase in traffic from Ask.com.

So maybe Ask.com did an index update or even an algorithm update recently.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks how does one get their site indexed by Ask.com.

Typically, a search engine likes to pick up new URLs and pages via a normal web crawl. You can see at Ask.com's Webmasters page (a page that has grown to add more information over time) that Ask.com's crawlers go around the web from link to link, looking for new and important content.

Ask utilizes Web crawlers to collect raw data and gather information that is used in building our ever-expanding search index. Crawling ensures that the information in our results is as up-to-date and relevant as it can possibly be. Our crawlers are well designed and professionally operated, providing an invaluable service that is in accordance with search industry standards.

But in the past, you were able to do paid inclusion, that is no longer available. But as Ask.com says, they do want to find new pages during the normal crawl process.

As a result of some recent enhancements to Ask, we're confident that we're indexing even more Web pages than ever, and that your site should appear in our Search index as a result of our ongoing "crawling" of the Web for new and updated sites and content.

Also in the past you were able to submit your pages to url@askjeeves.co.uk or url@askjeeves.com to get included. An old 2003 thread from WebmasterWorld claimed that it worked in the past. Does it still work? I hope to find out and update this thread, but I highly doubt it.

Currently, the best way to get included is via nice topical and popular links. Then just be very very patient.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Ask.com has renewed their licensing agreement with LookSmart. Via Business Wire;

LookSmart LOOK (ASX:LOK), an online advertising company, announced today that Ask.com, a leading search engine and wholly-owned business of IAC, has extended its license of LookSmart's AdCenter for Publishers through 2009. Ask.com leverages LookSmart's AdCenter as a component of its Ask Sponsored Listings PPC advertising program. Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) is an automated open-auction system that allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize campaigns on Ask.com and its publisher network.

Which begs the obvious question? Will Ask.com's sugar daddy, IAC, eventually just buy this division of LookSmart?

A WebmasterWorld thread has members saying:

Like a couple of drunks leaning on each other to stay standing.

Why don't they just get married, and stop pretending they can go it alone?

Funny, but does it make sense? I guess that is up to the management team over at Ask.com.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Technigma blog writes that when you go to AskX.com, Ask.com's test site, and click on the Ask X logo, you are then taken to the yay 2 do t0 logo parody Flickr page.

The Flickr page has a collection of many Web 2.0 logos, including Google's 2.0 logo, Yahoo! Music 2.0 and many others. But Ask.com's logo is missing, I think.

Cute move on Ask.com's part.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

The holiday season is here and most of the search engines are already sporting holiday season logos. Tonight is the last night of Chanukah, so we took down our logo for Chanukah and put up the Christmas logo. Here it is:

Google is changing their logo daily, this is the second logo, but make sure to track them here.

Yahoo! has a very cute one, that is flash, they skate around the logo, I took a static image of one frame.

Dogpile is sporting a shopping search engine theme.

Ask.com doesn't have anything yet, but I am sure they will (I'll update the post when it is added). Update: Ask.com does the background change...

Cre8asite Forums sports a holiday logo:

I wanted to wish you all a happy and healthy holidays!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Last night I reported at Search Engine Land that Ask.com Tests New Search Interface With Ask X. This is what I wrote:

The Read Write Web blog first spotted Ask.com testing a new interface they named Ask X. The new interface sports a steel background for the home page with more goodies inside. A search on Ask X for barry schwartz shows a three column pane interface. On the left hand side is the search box, where you can type and as you type you see search suggestions appear below the search box [Note From Danny: Pity this doesn't happen on the home page as well]. In the middle column is a smart answer, followed by two paid listings and then the organic results, with Ask.com's binoculars. You can also save to "my stuff" each result, if you mouse over them, notice the notepad with a plus sign. On the right pane you see image results, latest RSS results from blogs and the wikipedia entry of Barry Schwartz (not me, the other one). Gary Price himself has a bunch more details about the new release, so check it out here. You can also see more information at Ask.com and access Ask X at http://www.askx.com/.

In any event, I started a thread soon after at Cre8asite Forums to get more user feedback.

I noticed that many users outside of the US cannot see it without making sure to change their default preferences to US. Cre8asite Forum moderator, Ruud said:

Oh, that is quite pleasant! Place names and countries get some info extract, current time & weather, images, maps. Celebrities have a short bio, images. Many entries have an extract from Wikipedia. A non-specific search ("top stuff") returns just results. The interface is smart enough not to add images etc. Some searches ("Matt Cutts", "Barry Schwartz") have a Posts section in the sidebar. They do a much better job at presenting a lot of information, including sponsored stuff, than Yahoo does. Really nice... added to my bookmarks toolbar...

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld sparked this post from me. At SES Chicago '06, during a session named CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines the search engine representatives were asked about how they handle CSS.

It is currently easy to hide text using CSS, everyone knows it. But do people do it?

Back to the SES session, on this panel were search engine reps. Many of the search reps were new to conferences and were not necessarily prepared to get certain questions. It all started when a Yahoo representative told the crowd to open up your CSS so Yahoo can peak into it. Then Google said they will also be indexing JavaScript and AJAX and CSS, so don't use it to hack.

Now, if you know Yahoo! and specifically Google, they typically will never say that they will be doing anything in the future. They typically first do and then tell, but not tell and then do.

All the search engines, except for one, I believe (but I forgot if it was Ask.com or MSN) said that you should not block your CSS and JavaScript files from the search engines using your robots.txt, just in case they want to take a peak.

I am honestly still confused by that statement. Well, if we block it, will it raise a red flag? If it raises a red flag, will you manually peak? Are you going to algorithmically crawl those files and look for problems if we keep them accessible to you? If we format something a certain way, but it may appear like spam, but in reality it is not, will an automated ban come on the site?

Personally, I am not worried. But these types of responses, by the search engines, can fuel a lot of questions and unnecessary worries.

As pageoneresults says in the WebmasterWorld thread:

Google has a hard enough time now dealing with html/xhtml. Parsing CSS files and determining whether something is hidden or not is not a solution. Now the bot would need to determine why that CSS exists. There are many valid uses of display:none or display:hidden.

For those who may be hiding things through CSS or negatively positioning content off screen to manipulate page content, I surely wouldn't do that with any long term projects. ;)

The penalty for getting busted using this technique I would imagine is a permanent ban. No if's, and's, or but's, you're history. You'll need a pardon from the Governor to be reconsidered for inclusion. ;)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A huge topic at the SES conference last week was duplicate content. The definitions and how search engines handle duplicate content has changed a lot over the past few years. So that is why I dated the title of this post.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses just that.

In short, duplicate content is not a penalty. It hasn't been that way in years.

When you have 20 pages of the same page of content, a search engine will do their best to pick the best page on your behalf and filter out the remaining pages.

Why? The search engines do not want the same page in their index more than one time because it wastes resources and provides a bad search experience (showing the same result twice is not good).

So search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) all try to pick the best page (one with cleanest URL, most links, etc.). But if they pick the wrong URL (not the best page, in your opinion) then you may consider it a penalty, when it is not.

This is why you should help the search engines out by using 301s and robots.txt files to tell the search engines which pages are the important ones. With Google you can also use Sitemaps and increase the priority score of the important pages, relative to the others.

So it is your choice: Let the search engines choose for you or you make the choice.

Forum discussion Cre8asite Forums.

Ask.com launched AskCity, a new local city search portal that bridges together many of IAC's properties into one. Greg Sterling has an excellent write up at Search Engine Land. I got a personal review of AskCity last Friday, the cool AJAX features, point to point to point directions, cool set of features, data and usability were impressive to say the least. The "snapshot" feature is pretty cool as well, I always want to hold a position of a map and possibly use it later.

In any event, Ask sent be a full user guide on AskCity that I think I can post now. It shows all the details of the new portal, this way I don't miss anything. You can download the PDF file over here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The question at a WebmasterWorld forum is does registering your domain name for 10 years, instead of one year, help you rank better in Google?

Reading the thread, it appears that most senior members in the thread, feel that it does help.

Here are the arguments to register your domain name for an extended period of time:

(1) Shows the search engine that you are here to stay
(2) Google has a patent application that looks at this data (doesn't mean they use it)
(3) Secures your domain for an extended period of time
(4) Lower price per year if you register over an extended period

Seriously, anyone who is serious about their domain would not flinch at making the small investment of registering for an extended period of time. There is honestly, not that much to lose. There is a lot of back and forth in the forums about why people should not, but I personally disagree with all the arguments. So it costs an extra $30 to transfer the name to a new registrar, it is not the end of the world.

I am off to see when my domains expire, of course I have them set to auto renew, but at what yearly renewal schedule? :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks, how do you know if a search engine has penalized your site?

With most engines, the quickest method of checking that is to see if the engine has you in their index. How do you do that? Just do a site:www.domain.com command. Examples of those searches for this site:

• site:www.seroundtable.com at Google
• site:www.seroundtable.com at Yahoo! (redirects to Site Explorer)
• site:www.seroundtable.com at MSN (Live.com)
• inurl: www.seroundtable.com site:www.seroundtable.com at Ask.com

If no pages are found, you can assume something is wrong. If your site is very new, less than a month or so, then just wait and be patient (get more links). If it is Ask.com, they take longer than a month to get indexed. But if your site is old and it once was indexed in the search engines and you do not have any pages indexed now, then it may be a sign of a penalty.

If you exclude all site technical problems, the next thing you might want to do in Google's case is sign up with Google Sitemaps. They may show you enough detail to explain that you are banned and why... Or they may not.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I reported at SEW yesterday that Ask.com To Power Lycos Search & Search Ads. In short, Ask.com took the Lycos deal from Microsoft, to power Lycos's search and ppc engine.

Ask.com, a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) and LYCOS, Inc.(www.lycos.com), a leading web portal, today announced a multi-year agreement whereby Ask.com will be the search and sponsored listings provider for the LYCOS Network, including LYCOS.com, Hotbot.com, Tripod.com and Angelfire.com. Under the terms of the agreement, Ask.com will provide branded algorithmic search, including Web Search, Image Search, and Zoom Related Search, as well as the Ask Sponsored Listings advertising product across the LYCOS Network. LYCOS is the fifth most popular portal in the U.S., consistently ranked as a top 20 U.S. Web property, with more than 6 million monthly unique visitors using LYCOS Network Search. In addition, LYCOS will transition its current sponsored listings advertisers currently using its pay-per-click platform, InSite AdBuyer, to Ask Sponsored Listings, and will promote the Ask.com PPC product to advertisers throughout the LYCOS Network.

Now, some folks such as Andrew Goodman, who are heavy in the PPC arena, are saying We don't have a huge amount of time to think about Ask and Lycos these days.

I have not seen much forum discussion on this topic yet. There is a thread at WebmasterWorld that doesn't add much, there is more questions then excitement about this deal.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

Most of the search engines are sporting fancy and scary logos for Halloween today. Here is a run down of this years Halloween search engine logos.

http://www.google.com/search?q=halloween

http://events.yahoo.com/halloween06/

http://www.ask.com/web?q=Halloween (sporting a whole background change)

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/guides/halloween.htm

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses the response by Ask.com to Google's request for you to only "Google" at Google.com. To summarize, Google posted Do you "Google?" asking;

We'd like to make clear that you should please only use "Google" when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services.

Ask.com decided to have some fun with that request, as all of the media did, with their post You Do and/or May, In Fact, "Ask" (or "ask").

As our colleagues at Google work to protect their brand from becoming a generic term for Web search, we're receiving lots of mail and calls asking us to clarify the difference between "ask" and "Ask" (as in "Ask.com®")

To me, this seems a bit like Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com's, humor - but I have no proof of that. It is nice to see Ask.com play like this.

In any event, there is a nice discussion about trademarks and copyrights - and use of terms at Cre8asite Forums if you are up for it.

Currently a search on Raccoon at Google.com brings back an AdWords ad from Ask.com. The ad description says, "Use the New Ask.com to find it. Save time. Search better." If you click on the title, which reads, "Raccoon" it takes you to a Smart Answer result at Ask.com for Raccoon. Of course, that Smart Answer rocks.

I am seriously impressed by this long tailed approach to marketing Ask.com. I have always wondered why search engines didn't use this approach more. Heck, bid on a ton of obscure, low priced keywords, to send traffic towards your own engine. Shopping search engines do it all the time. Travel also, heck most niche vertical engines do this. Why not the main search engines?

I am happy Ask.com is taking this approach.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am not going to do an other review of Ask Mobile Search, I did so already at SEW blog. You can access Ask Mobile search at http://m.ask.com/ or http://mobile.ask.com/.

A WebmasterWorld forum thread asks why is no one complaining that Ask is using Skweezer technology. It basically downsizes your pages and repurposes them for mobile. So Skweezer may remove ads and such.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

MediaPost reported a week ago about Ask.com's plans to release a new platform for their sponsored search platform. Last night a thread went up at WebmasterWorld with the new feature list.

1. Improvements in cost and budget control
2. New ad structure improves content management
3. Streamlined UI simplifies common tasks
4. More flexible reporting
5. Enhanced Bulk Upload tool

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: More details here there is a link to a "ASL 2.0 Webinar" with the launch details.

A WebmasterWorld has discussion from SEOs on mostly noticing traffic shifts from Ask.com. Webmasters are noticing an increase in referrals from the Ask.com search engines.

Encouraging results turn sour:

For the last few months it has been a rising source of traffic for me. Up to Friday I was getting about 1000-1200 vistors a day from it. Now down to about 10.

Confirmation from the above by Senior Member BillyS:

Something seems to be going on with Ask recently. I don't get a lot of traffic from Ask but at one point I saw three or four referals from Ask in a row - all in a short timeframe.

Marcia, ex-WMW moderator:

Ask is up to 9.8% for one of my sites that fits their demographic, and that's not even relevant to the overall percentage of search engine traffic sources. I've noticed a steady stream of referrals throughout the day.

Good to see some life from Ask.com in the search forums. I also took a quick look at how Ask.com Image Search Gets Smarter, really, I was impressed. Oh, I am not posting this because they gave me some cool Ask.com Schwag recently. There is true discussion taking place on Ask.com recently.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Today is 9/11, most of us will never forget the details of those days. I remember that I was off from school that day, and hearing something happened via the computer. I went to turn on the TV and I saw the first tower on fire, watching home footage of the tragedy happening over and over again. I also remember watching live footage of the second tower getting hit. Then the disaster of the second and then first tower falling. It was on TV, it just didn't look real - but it was.

The Internet slowed to a halt, web sites stalled, news sites didn't load, too much traffic to those sites. I communicated with friends and family via IM, since phones both analog and mobile were not working in NYC. And Google Systems reminds us of the Google Home page that aggregated some of the latest news.

The search community has started some threads on 9/11 today. Here are some threads I found right now.

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• V7N Forums

I suspect other forums to start threads soon, Ill update this post as I see them. Also, Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on 9/11.

Update: Ask.com posted a major change to their homepage for the night of 9/11. The screen capture can be seen here, or you can just view the background image here.

Every now and then on an off day, I revisit the Big Blue Pineapple Chair page I have on this site. Why? Well, it gives me an idea of how well (1) this site is doing in the various search engines and (2) how well the search engines are doing with this site.

Same difference, but with number one above, I place the blame on my SEO work. With number two, I place the blame with the search engines themselves.

Since I have never made a change to that page, I suspect we can blame the search engines and not myself. Oh, I am sure the search engines have their excuses. But let's dig deeper.

Historically, I have been tracking this page, for those please see:

• The one and only Big Blue Pineapple Chair page
  
• December 1, 2004 review
  
• August 12, 2005 review
  
• August 16, 2005 review
  
• December 14, 2005 review

Ok, so from time to time, search engines rank that page differently.

Today, how are the engines treating that page?

Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 40! Ummm... Something seems wrong here!

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 1, that is correct.

MSN: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 1, that is also correct.

Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 4, indented under an other seroundtable result. Top result is some spammy redirect.

At one point, Yahoo! didn't rank it well. At one point, MSN didn't either. At one point Ask ranked it better. And at one point, Google also ranked it well.

So what has changed? Can we look at this one example to see how Google changed as a whole for all sites? Seem typical of what we see in a forum?

At this time, it appears Google doesn't like this site. In a few weeks, months, years... maybe Google will. But this does not represent Google's results as a whole. Yea, well, I am still upset Google doesn't rank that page in the top 10. I see no reason why it is not the most targeted page for users. Heck, no one wants a big blue pineapple chair, they don't really even make them. So relevancy here, well, it is not existent from a searcher's perspective. From an SEO's perspective, I think my page is pretty well relevant.

Who knew I would have this obsession with Big Blue Pineapple Chairs?

The reason for this post is two fold. (1) To keep track of the rankings of that page and (2) to note how this is a typical thread at a forum. Many folks look at their isolated site and suggest the issue is global for all sites. I doubt this is the case. But giving Google specifics, like I am above, can sometimes help them improve relevancy on their side. If they deem it appropriate.

Gary Price, of Ask.com and ResourceShelf, has proposed to his long time girlfriend, Lisa last night. Gary & Lisa will be getting married some time this Spring, I believe in Chicago.

Gary has given his soul to this SEM community. Serving at Search Engine Watch as the News Editor prior to joining Ask.com. Gary has strong ties with all those in the search community. Gary is a genius, he is extremely generous and a down right good guy. He has been a true friend to me over the past few years and it is an honor for me to break this news.

Gary, we all love you and wish you and Lisa all the best. Mazol Tov! Yisha & I can't wait for the wedding.

Please feel free to wish Gary & Lisa a congrats at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread.

A WebmasterWorld thread notes of a BusinessWeek report that Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are coming together to form standards on what is an "invalid click."

The Internet's leading search engines are teaming up with an advertising trade group to find a better way to identify and measure "click fraud," a scam that has raised doubts about the Web's trustworthiness as a marketing vehicle.

The initiative, announced Wednesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, will draw upon the expertise of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- the owners of the top online search engines -- to attack a problem threatening to erode their profits. Combined, the three companies control 86 percent of the lucrative U.S. search engine market, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Danny at the SEW Blog also covered this with a quick recap of the News.com story.

Definitions are incredibly important and without it, you won't know exactly SEMs and PPC Engines are trying to prevent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask.com has launched a new Smart Answer that pulls sites RSS feeds based on the style of query. Gary Price was very involved in this release that was announced last night on the Ask.com blog. If you conduct a search on seroundtable you will notice at the top of the results appear this.

A query on seroundtable is navigational in nature, so why not show the RSS results? Smart... Last night a query on Search Engine Roundtable (1) did not return the RSS results and (2) did not rank this site number one. Both seem to have been fixed.

Not all navigational searches will bring you these results. Sites without RSS feeds obviously won't benefit from this feature. Also, Ask.com only used the "most popular feeds chosen by our users in Bloglines." Soon they will expand this out to more feeds. I give this two thumbs up.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there are any issues with using hotlink protection for your images and the same images suffering in image search. Hotlink protection, if you do not know what it is, is when you want to dissuade others from pulling your images directly from your server. You can use hotlink protection, such as with htaccess, to either block or serve up a different image, to those pulling the images from you. But does this affect your search rankings in image search engines like Google image search?

Most of the folks in the forum discussion say there is no issue with Google and hotlink protection. Some recommend that you allow certain domains to display the images properly, such as your own domain (duh) and the shopping search engines (if that applies), news engines (if that applies), blog engines, image search engines and so on. But that list can get long.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Wanted to wish you all a Happy July 4th! I will be taking the day off.

To keep yourself entertained, please check out http://www.ask.com/.

Pretty bold!

WebmasterWorld Senior Member, JAB Creations, documents Ask.com's spiders crawling non-existant pages. I don't fully understand why this would happen, but typically a member at WebmasterWorld with that many posts, tend to know what they are doing. So it must be somewhat out of the ordinary.

Basically, JAB Creations feels like the search engines are crawling his sites as if they are "crawling someone else's site." The waste of bandwidth and CPU because of these spiders can be upsetting to any webmaster.

Forum discussion at Ask WMW Forum & MSN WMW Forum (with a response from MSNdude).

A SearchDay article by Danny and Chris over at Search Engine Watch named Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly talks about how Marshall Simmonds (first with About.com and then acquired by NY Times) made the NYTimes.com search engine friendly. Part of that process is to allow the search engines, including Google, to access, crawl, index and rank content that would require a username and password by a normal Web user.

Danny and Chris ask the question and answer it; "Isn't this cloaking—serving different pages to a search engine and an individual web browser? Yes, it is." Yes, there is a BUT;

Although both Google and Yahoo warn against cloaking, Marshall says both companies are aware of what the Times is doing, and apparently condone the practice.

"They want the content, and they're very interested in displaying it," says Marshall.

Reviewing the latest from Google on cloaking you see that Matt Cutts makes a clear distinction;

So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

NYTimes.com is clearly doing something "special for Googlebot" here and in terms of how Matt Cutts defines "acceptable cloaking," this does not fall within those terms. At other engines like Yahoo!, Ask and MSN, engines that have not taken as strong a stance on cloaking, this most likely would be acceptable. But at Google, I believe, based on Matt Cutts continued campaign against cloaking, this would not fall within Google's webmaster guidelines.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Via Search Engine Watch Forums, an interview in French, of Danica Brinton of Ask.com's Blog Search product. There is a PDF document of the English translation that you can download here.

Key Points not already covered at Ask.com Launches Blog & Feed Search include:

• Ask.com Blog Search uses the Bloglines Subscription Data
• More subscriptions the more quality the site
• Most robust blog index with 1.5 billion documents indexed, and 4-6 million added per day
• Search Filters
• Binoculars views

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a thread with a fun name at High Rankings Forum named False Gods. The thread discusses how when searching for some "ego keywords" (keywords a person wants to rank well for) he found himself ranking well. But then he noticed that Google personalized search was turned on.

The results within personalized search, no matter which search engine, are tailored to your liking. So if you want to be number one for "seo" you can be over time. Especially if you use the remove result function until your site is #1 and also if you tend to click on your pages more often than others.

Past related article on this that may be of interest is named Search Engine Optimization is Changing So Quickly.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Last week Ask.com announced the launch of Ask.com Blog & Feed Search. The features include;

* World-Class Results: The result of mixing ExpertRank and Bloglines data. * Three Flavors of Relevance: Search by Date, Popularity, or Relevance (a combination of the first two) * Three Sorting Options: Sort by Posts, Feeds or News * Unique Tools: Including Binoculars to preview the last 5 posts from a feed * Open Subscription Options: Subscribe to a feed in Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo, or Newsgator * Open Posting Options: Post a link to Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Newsvine or Digg

They also added more features to bloglines search, such as;

* In-line Previews: See an entire feed, including pictures and videos, directly from the results page * More search options: Including search citations, search within your subscriptions and even Search Outside of your subscriptions * More Info: See how many subscribers and citations a feed or post have

The cool features include the Binoculars preview, the quick subscribe links and the post to links.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week I wrote Ask.com Promoting via TV But Not via PPC? where I noted Ask.com appeared not to be using search ads to promote the engine. But they are using TV ads, like often, to promote the engine. Last night I was watching 24 (who wasn't) and I saw one of the Ask.com commercials. It was the one about the "pimped out search engine." So I decided to see if they are advertising for that keyword at Google.

So guess who is advertising for pimped out search engine? Not Google, not MSN, not Yahoo - Ask.com. Would it be smart for the three other search engines to bid on that term also? I suspect so, but I also suspect that they wouldn't out of respect. There are some times results from the other engines, when broad match comes in, but it may require a few refreshes of the page.

Here is the ad.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

We scold Ask.com for not using PPC to promote their brand but we most praise Yahoo! for using Google AdSense for promoting their brand.

A WebmasterWorld thread notes that Yahoo! is using Google's contextual ad program, Google AdSense, to promote its own product. It is important to note, that Yahoo! may not be directly advertising in the Google AdWords program. It may be a Yahoo! affiliate who is doing the leg work here. If that is the case, and it probably is, then I will take away my praise from Yahoo! Nah, I am just kidding. Yahoo! has an affiliate program, that deserves some praise also.

It is also important to note that although I scolded Ask.com for not using PPC to promote their search engine, sem4u posted that he did see Ask.com ads in the Google AdSense program as well. So there you go.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator, skibum, posted a thread asking an obvious question no one else asked. Why is Ask.com spending all this money on TV ads and not spending a dime on PPC ads?

Do a search at Google for search engine, do you see an ad or organic listing for them on the first page? I don't.

Do a search at Yahoo for search engine, do you see an ad or organic listing for them on the first page? I don't.

Do a search at MSN for search engine, do you see an ad or organic listing for them on the first page? I don't.

So, Mr. Ask.com, search engine, why aren't you targeting search users looking for other search engines?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, I posted at SEW blog Ask.com Second TV Blitz Stars Chief Scientist Guru, Apostolos Gerasoulis. I have now spotted the commercials that you can view for yourself at http://about.ask.com/docs/about/televisionads.shtml.

Yes, Apostolos Gerasoulis, is one of the founders of Teoma, the search engine behind Ask.com. And yes, he is the one staring in the TV commercial. Do you think he did a good job of bring across the message? I am not sure...

Here it is in text:

RIMS This ad shows Apostolos Gerasoulis in action talking about how he loves "a tight ride." He explains how Ask.com understands the difference between "tight" cars and "phat" cars.

LIBRARIANS
This ad features Apostolos Gerasoulis among the bookshelves at Rutgers University, standing in the very spot where he came up with the idea for ExpertRank, our unique relevancy technology. Here he talks about how librarians prefer Ask.com, and the ongoing search for knowledge.

Share your thoughts at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Earth Day was this past Sunday and there was a ton of news and blog buzz on the search engines being creative with their engines on that day however, there were no threads in our forums. Today, I finally noticed a thread at DigitalPoint Forums about the special day. The thread creator notes which engines made an effort for Earth Day and which did not - also asking you to comment on which you find to be your favorite.

Continue reading "Search Engine Commemorate Earth Day 2006"

The new CEO of Ask.com was just announced, it is Jim Lanzone - the true face of Ask.com today. A great move by Ask.com, in response to Ask.com's current CEO Steve Berkowitz leaving Ask for MSN. The press release says;

Previously Mr. Lanzone was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Ask U.S., leading product management, marketing and engineering for the company under former IAC Search & Media CEO Steve Berkowitz. "Jim is one of the most respected leaders in the search industry, having been principally responsible every day for the turnaround of the Ask product and brand over the past several years," said Doug Lebda, IAC President and Chief Operating Officer. "With his vision for the future and successful track record for driving the Ask.com business, he has been and will be the ideal leader for the next stage of the company's growth." "We have a lot of momentum behind Ask.com," said Mr. Lanzone. "My goal is to keep pushing us forward down the path we're on. With the team we have in place and the backing of IAC/InterActiveCorp, I believe Ask can take a significant piece of the search pie in the years ahead."

I have had many conversations with Jim over the years - I am a huge fan of Jim and I think this is a great move for Ask.com.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Continued forum discussion at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  

Shocking news from the SEW Blog, Ask.com Chief Steve Berkowitz Jumps Ship To Microsoft's MSN. I personally didn't see it coming. The CEO of one of the fourth ranking search engine, Ask.com, has left to join the third ranking search engine, MSN Search. Wow! He will officially leave Ask.com May 8th. Who will replace him, still is yet to be decided. I will hold my comments on how this will affect Ask.com, until they name a successor.

Here are links to the major new sources on this:

• Search Engine Watch Blog
  
• Wall Street Journal
  
• New York Times
  
• Reuters
  
• Information Week
  
• News.com
  
• The Street.com

Forum Roundup:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  

With the recent marketing blitz performed by Ask.com, and the latest positive buzz on the search engine, with some positive data to back it up, Ask.com has been beginning to get some attention from SEOs.

A recent Search Engine Watch Forum thread has an SEO saying;

Seriously though, our clients are seeing the commercials and are starting to bug us about their rankings on Ask. Can we get a discussion going about how they rank sites?

Makes me so happy to see The Little Engine That Could really succeeding, really makes me happy.

Now it's time to get your SEO hats on for Ask.com optimization.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

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;

• Jeeves9000 - Robo Jeeves
• Aks Jeeves - Jeeves Long Lost Brother
• Jeeves's Make Over
• Jeeves Hide and Go Seek

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.

View Large Image

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;

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums

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.

• Google # 1: http://www.google.com/search?q=yisha
  
• Yahoo! # 8: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=yisha
  
• Ask # 2: http://www.ask.com/web?q=yisha
  
• MSN # 1: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=yisha

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.

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

It has been a while since I chatted about Ask Jeeves. Well last night they posted a new blog entry over at the Ask Jeeves blog named New AJDS Updates. In that entry they list out a list of changes made to the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search application.

-- Folder Indexing Preferences (choose what to index!)

-- Improved PDF indexing

-- Email attachment name indexing

-- Improved Zip file indexing

-- Enhanced previews for Office files

-- Indexing of iTunes metadata (search by title, artist, album, genre, and year)

-- Search term highlighting

-- Full Outlook Express support

-- Pause indexing (with new animated indexing graphic)

-- Improved stability overall

-- New homepage with most recently viewed files

-- Improved status callouts

-- Writely document search (yes, Web-based word processing search...in a desktop search tool!)

And they hint to APIs coming soon at the end, "rest assured they are on the roadmap."

I started a thread at Cre8asite Forum and at Search Engine Watch Forum.

Ask Jeeves is calling them tasty cheats, because not only can Ask tell you Final Fantasy PS2 Cheats but also tell you some turkey recipes for one of my favorite holidays.

We've partnered with AllRecipes.com in order to provide a powerful Smart Search experience that serves up some of their most popular & highest rated recipes and delivers them right to your fingertips. In fact, I already started doing dry runs of a holiday meal in order to get over my fear of entertaining dinner guests:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Based on an Ask Jeeves blog posting named Deep Thoughts at Web 2.0, where Jim Lanzone writes up some detailed figures on Bloglines and its subscriber base.

Adrian at Cre8asite posted a thread summarizing some of those stats;

In Bloglines they have a pretty decent 1.3 million feeds with at least subscriber. I guess that says as much about Bloglines popularity as much anything, it owuld be interesting to compare that with similar stats from other RSS Reader services. But considering how many blogs there are meant to be, let alone all the other types of site now using feeds for news and things, that seems a relatively low number. And Jim says in the post, they kind of thought, is that all?

And then to show that less than 40,000 feeds had more than 20 subscribers shows the drop off in usage. That's less than 3% of the feeds with at least 1 subscriber also having more than 20.

I also thought the 'Search Index' section was quite interesting. Despite having billions of indexed pages, 6million cover half of all clicked on results. And looking at the graph, 250million cover 90%.

Makes for some good RSS/Blog/Bloglines discussion.

I just wanted to let all you know, that I am now engaged to be married to my beautiful girlfriend, Yisha.

Why am I posting this here, at a search blog? Well, because of the way I did it.

I proposed via Ask Jeeves. I brought Yisha to my office, ask her to search on her name. While she was doing that I kneeled behind her with the ring and flowers. She typed in her name into Ask Jeeves, full name, and up came a special Smart Answer (thanks to Jim Lanzone and team) with the proposal.

I don't have much time to explain it, so go to the idea page for more information.

Also try rustybrick engagement for some other smart searches.

Thanks again to Jim Lanzone, Scott Grieder, Steve Orr, Daniel Read, and the whole Ask Jeeves team!

GeoTrust, probably the second most popular online security brand on the net, launched a new search service today named TrustWatch. Ask Jeeves wrote a blog entry named “Trust, But Verify" to symbolize the message behind the new search service.

Powered by Ask Jeeves algorithmic search technology, the new service is designed to combat web-based fraud, identity theft and phishing scams. Users simply type queries into the search box at www.trustwatch.com and view easily understood green, yellow and red verification symbols beside each search result that represent the web site's trustworthiness rating.

For example, users wanting to donate money for tsunami relief can type "Tsunami Relief Organizations" directly into the TrustWatch search box. The Ask Jeeves search engine will return relevant search results based on each site's authority on that specific topic, including redcross.org, usaid.gov, directrelief.org and americares.org. Each result will also appear with the TrustWatch rating prominently displayed, so users can quickly select trustworthy sites and donate with confidence.

So I decided to give it a spin, let me take you through it. Searched on web site design services and the first result was http://www.hwg.org/, which was not verified. So I clicked on the little yellow light with a question mark (verification icons explained here) and received this pop up window.

The next two top tabs look like, this and this respectively. To me, this seems pretty easy to spam.

Forum thread started at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Back in May 2005 we heard the rumors about Ask being renamed but today word comes from TheStreet.com article named Diller Sacks the Butler.

Jeeves is out of a job.

IAC/InterActiveCorp. is dropping the butler who doubles as the mascot of its recently acquired Ask Jeeves online search business.

I guess we no longer need to play the name guessing game and just try to play the 'when will it happen" game.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & Cre8asite Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Jeeves is sporting a new pirate costume this morning, in respect for something called Talk Like A Pirate Day. I would have never heard of the special day, if it wasn't for Jeeves.

What I find humorous is that if you do a search on yar at Ask, it brings up the same Smart Search result.

Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday invented in 1995 by two Americans who proclaimed September 19 as the day when everyone should talk like pirates. Instead of "hello," an observer of this holiday may greet acquaintances with "Ahoy, me hearties,” for example. Yar

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Perform a search at Ask Jeeves on the keyword phrase ipod and you'll notice an old smart answers feature that comes up, customer ratings & compare prices. This is how it was done in the past, partnering with pricegrabber.com. It works well, but what about those more generic searches?

Based on last nights Ask Jeeves's Blog posting named Compare. Contrast. Repeat. Ask has integrated Gifts.com, an IAC property, into http://ask.gifts.com/ and Smart Answers.

The example given at the AJ blog is a search on gifts, which brings up a more generic smart answer taking you to the ask.gifts.com category landing pages.

Forum Coverage, I posted at Cre8asite Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

I call this thread, the funny thread of the week. A WebmasterWorld thread named Google Penalizes for being #1 is both funny but at the same time you can learn a lot from it. First let me quote the initial post which has been picked apart by the members.

Google Penalizes for being #1! Yes, it's true! Once you are in the #1 Position google WILL NOT let you get any higher, but WILL allow you fall - often drastically! I have seen this time and time again.

Lesson #1: Risks :: If you have a number one ranking for a very visible query, then you better have received that ranking 100% naturally or you will lose it. We all know Google, Yahoo!, etc. will manually make hand adjustments to very popular search queries. It just makes practical sense for them to do this. So if you do have a number one ranking and you have an inkling that you should not (even the slightest), do not expect it to last.

Lesson #2: Ranking Higher :: One can make out from the quote above that this member is upset that he/she can not get his/her ranking higher then the number one organic result. Of course, the member does not mean that, but let's assume he/she did. There are several ways to get a listing above the #1 organic result in Google. You can go the AdWords route and hope that Google inserts sponsored results above the organic results (they do very often). You can also try to get into Google News, Google Images, Google Definitions, Google etc... These are all vertical searches that are often placed above the natural listings and can you give nice visibility. Try a search for google on Google and see the news items at the top.

Lesson #3: All Fun :: Have fun with the thread, enjoy it and don't get upset. Honestly, I have number one rankings, I do not deserve in some obscure engines. I do not expect them to last. I am having fun with it now and won't go to a forum to express my deep inner feelings after they are lost.

Looks like SEW forums just got another search engine rep to add to their belts. Promoted from a discussion on whether or not Ask Jeeves would employ the ability for agencies to manage all their client account under one roof. Mike McGrath, with the Sponsored Listings Client Services posted today that indeed their is the ability for SEM agencies to manage all their client account under the same roof. He says:

"The new automated system does allow advertisers or agencies to link together an unlimited number of accounts, each with an unlimited number of campaigns. To set this up, go to the “Manage Account Access” page for your account. Then, input the account name (i.e. email address) in the “Give User Access to this Account Address” and choose the access level (Read, Read and Modify, etc.). "

Go to know, and very nice. I hope Mike sticks around and answer other questions from members. Will be a great resource to have as people develop questions. Some of the stuff they have, in the program that is not mentioned thoroughly and or either not in the help file in detail so having a rep is a good place to start.

Mike also mentions that if you are a not spending more than $5000/month then you are confined to the email service for your questions at listingssupport@askjeeves.com. If you are spending over $5000 a month then you can use the AJSL Managed Account program and actually talk to a real person.

In my personal opinion I really don't see Ask Jeeves sponsored listings doing better than any of the other main PPC providers out there. I have been using the programs since they started about 2 weeks ago, and I keep asking myself when I use the program, why they didn't do anything to spice it up, do something innovative, different, or creative so that they stand apart and users can identify the value in what they are trying to do.

At the last SES conference in San Jose, on the evening forums on the 3rd day was an Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan. We didn't blog on this, but it was a very good sessions for the fact that people finally got a chance to voice their opinions on what they wanted to see. People were primarily pissed at Google. It was the first time since I started this SEO stuff soo soo long ago that I have actually see people turn on Google. They were tired of the canned responses and lack of desire to implement better functions in the Adwords accounts when all along they could just do it very easily. As someone once told me, their is "great money in inefficency".

Some of the primary concerns people had related to very simple things that could be fixed easily, other not so much. But the lack of response on behalf of Google was being to wear people thin. Some of the things from my notes that concerned them the most:

• Better tools!


• Better tools to track success


• What affects ranking...


• Better fraudulent click tracking... tell them what and where its happening


• Better inferface, simplier


• More responsive to customer problems


• Better phone support and better reps


• Support for better tools for agencies


• Integration of 3rd party management tools, API


• Educate the editors


• ...and finally Better Tools!

While there is more, that touches on some of it. People need better tools was the consensus from that session I attended. When it came down to it, tools were important to people, and it was simple stuff like having a tool to schedule when and when not the campaign could run. Currently you can't edit this, its either on or off.

So the jist of my speal here is to identify Ask could have and should have come in with better functionality and some neat features. They could have easily attracted advertisers with ease being that they could say "Hey look, we did what they wouldn't!", and then again maybe they will in the future. Guess we'll see.

Continue discussion on ASK at SEW Forums