There must be something in the water this week. While the biggest new media acquisition story of the day has to be CBS buying CNET for $1.8 billion, big companies are swallowing up smaller ones left and right. Media company Comcast is buying social networking site Plaxo for something like $150 million, while Ask.com is shelling out an undisclosed sum for Lexico, the company that runs Dictionary.com.

While there's been a lot of speculation recently that someone was going to buy Plaxo, Comcast wasn't the first company that sprung to mind. We figured a company that already has ties to the social networking space like Google or Facebook would have made more sense. In a blog post on the subject, Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says Comcast has plans to "bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers." That means using Plaxo's technology to connect with your contacts across multiple devices. And since Comcast is already in the TV, phone, and ISP business, it should be interesting to see how this plays out. Perhaps your TV viewing habits will automatically be added to your social networking profile? Yeah, we hope not.

The Ask.com/Lexico deal seems like a more natural fit. We doubt Lexico's popular web sites like Dictionary.com will disappear. Rather, Ask will be able to increase its overall web traffic by bringing the new sites into the fold.

Microsoft is headed towards the rollout of a new Live.com search today, including a brand spankin' new interface.

There will be a gathering in Mountain View at the Microsoft campus for industry insiders to get a glimpse at Microsoft's latest search interface and redesign today. The new redesign will see a refreshing look for the search interface taking cues from both Ask and Google Universal Search. MSN Shopping will also get tied into the search results for consumer product results, making for an all around better user experience.

Akram Hussein, a Windows Live Platform Program Manager caught a glimpse of the new look while on his home PC, and managed to snap a few shots of the cleaned up design. He has since pulled down the post with images from his website but we did manage to get copies and have compared them with the current Live.com search results. We will have to wait and see what else is truly unveiled as all information from the meeting will be under an embargo for later this evening.

In more MSN news, there is also talk of MSN Video adding instant start and less intrusive ads in video content.

UPDATE: Microsoft's press release on the new updated Live Search Engine.



[via marketingpilgrim]

One of the growing new trends in the online space has been embedding objects. From news feeds, twitter notifications, product recommendations and IM chats.

Google has a great embeddable maps addition for the ever popular Google Maps. However, other major online mapping providers have been late to the game, Yahoo! and Microsoft included. Ask has stepped up to the game, and now offers embeddable maps. Simply search for your destination and click on the embed link. Ask City gives users the choice of embedding maps in three different sizes, small, medium and large.

Although their innovations sometimes seem to get overshadowed with larger Google and Yahoo announcements, it's always nice to see when a smaller online company like Ask steps up the game before larger veterans.

Seems like the big guys could be getting in a little trouble for violating patents. Among them, AOL, Amazon, Borders, Google, IAC (ASK), and Yahoo have all been accused.

The charges from this IP-related company that stem from a patent infringement make notes about the violating parties implementing systems that 'comprise interpreting electronic messages with rule base and case base knowledge engines'. Whatever that means. The claim does outlay the method as well as steps involved for receiving an electronic message and interpreting the electronic message. We all know this is most likely an effort by said plaintiff to get a little green in their pockets the filthy lawyer way. Especially when the company involved, as well as a slew of other IP-related companies, are associated with the same attorney. And it also just so happens that the same company suing the above companies, has also filed patent lawsuits with Oracle and Sirius Satellite Radio. Some people have guesstimated the settlement amount to be in upwards up six and seven figures.

Bloglines has just packed a bunch of new features into its online news feed searching, subscribing to and reading service, and it all begins with a start page.

Bloglines headlines its new feature developments with a personalized start page. This is the page that brings everything together in a quick and easy view with an AJAX interface. There is nothing like starting feed reading off with a view like this to help you distinguish and gravitate towards your top interests first, before they get lost in a sea of unread material. Users can also now drag and drop feeds to add them into a three panel interface. To make things even easier, Bloglines has integrated mouse over previews to get a quick snippet of the content for a more in depth look at the article. Two other views are also available to complement the three panel view, a full view, and quick view mode. The quick view lists out titles for an easy news scan, with the full view listing out full article content.

This new redevelopment comes more than two years after the Bloglines acquisition by IAC interactive, the company that owns the popular ASK search engine. It can be accessed at http://beta.bloglines.com.

Ask has a helpful little feature in all searches that have to do with local information. A clock is now embedded on the right hand side of the screen, with the time clicking by in seconds. The date is also present, with current weather conditions underneath.

Thanks Ask. This is an extremely handy feature when researching new locations for travel or business, and a first of its kind for search engines. After all, who wants to call to enquire on local services at 6am!

[via searchengineland]

Sure, Google says it plans to reduce the amount of time it hangs on to personal user data for. But Ask.com is aiming to win the anonymous web search war (is there a war? Did somebody forget to tell us?) with a new weapon: AskEraser.

Here's how it works. You enter a search term into the world's 4th most popular search engine. Ask.com will perform the search. And then it will immediately forget your name. Just like that cute guy/girl you met at the bar last week.

You'll be able to set your privacy preferences and they will be clearly viewable on the search results page so you will always know whether Ask is holding your data or erasing it.

AskEraser isn't available yet, but the press release indicates it's coming soon. The company also plans to roll out a new system that will disassociate search history from an IP address or cookie after 18 months -- which is pretty much the same thing Google has promised.

Search engine Ask.com has launched a new site design. When you first navigate to the website, you'll see a clean page with a search bar and a couple of icons representing different types of searches (web, images, city, news, blogs, etc). It's a bit like Google, if Google had icons next to its search types.

But once you enter a search term, things are very different. First off, if you pause for a second after typing your term, suggestions will pop up. For example, when you start to write "download sq," Ask will recommend "download squad."

When you get to the results page, you can preview listings by scrolling your mouse over the binoculars button. Or you can click the + button to bookmark a page if you register for an account.

Account holders can also customize their results by selecting locations or setting up filters. You can also modify the start page with skins. Right now, that means choosing from a list of images, but TechCrunch reports you'll eventually be able to upload your own images.

[via The New York Times]

Jason Calacanis, the man behind the Weblogs Inc empire, (that this blog is a part of) has officially announced his latest project, Mahalo, and its main goal is to help people - a lot. Jason has kept a great number of people itching to know what he's been working on during his Entrepreneur in Action at Sequoia Capital and the news was dropped today at the Wall Street Journal's D conference.

Mahalo (thank you, in Hawaiian) plays off what Yahoo and Ask did way back in the early days of the internet and what DMOZ is still well known for today, indexing internet content by hand. However Mahalo spices things up to provide much better end results for users. But how can people do this better then say for instance, Google's machines? Typically when searching Google, Yahoo, or other machine based search engines, top quality results can get lost in the mix, and a real deep quality search might not get made. Mahalo's search guides that compile these results do use top locations like Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious and other services to create clean and organized results, except they aim to get the best results possible for users. Could it ever beat out Google? No, they really are not in competition, but it sure can provide an additional location to search for more accurate and higher quality results.

The 40 person team behind Mahalo currently has the top 4,000 search engine result pages complete so far in the initial Alpha launch, and hopes to have over 10,000 by the end of 2007.

Ask has been running some new controversial ads in the UK recently informing people about Google's huge success and the impact it could have.

The campaign is trying to get across that 75% of all searches performed in the UK are done through Google, thus limiting the sources that people are getting information from.

Ask is trying to ramp up its search engine market in Europe by creating a tiny rebellious market through the use of a non branded campaign encompassing radio, street stunts, TV, and web. Most ads and materials do not even mention Ask, they just direct the audience to an Information Revolution website which encourages people to "Join the Revolution."

It's a very interesting and unique approach, and Google welcomes the competition, but has Ask gone a little far by creating a "Revolution" to gain a bit of market share in Europe?

Check out a video of the ads and commercials after the jump...

Additional coverage can be found on SearchEngineLand and WSJ.

Ask.com has started including official blog feeds in their search results when you search for popular brands or web site names. The feed listing displays the last three or four posts on the website's official blog at the top of the results page, along with a link to the blog itself. The feed even appears above the sponsored listings.

When you search Download Squad, for example, you'll see our last three blog posts on the search page. Likewise a search for 37signals turned up a feed for their Signal Vs Noise blog, and searches for del.icio.us and reddit turned up their official company blogs. A search for digg, however, returned only popular front page links and no mention of Digg the Blog.

The one blog I was disappointed not to be able to find was the Ask.com Blog itself. The post detailing the flatline in office productivity when a particular Google product failed is enough on its own to warrant more prominent placement on the Ask.com network.

All and all I like this feature. Ask.com has been trying to push the innovation envelope for two years now and they have created a long series of Class A products along the way. Ask.com's blog search functionality is easily the best and most complete of all the major offerings, and it is great to see this feature find its way into other areas of the Ask.com website.

It seems like the world of search is getting a bit safer after all. SiteAdvisor has reported that search engines linked to 12% fewer sites that showed risky content, as deemed by McAfee. The report also found that search results by Google, AOL and Ask are far less likely to contain risky leads like MSN and Yahoo!. Some surprising results, though, were that paid results in search engines were actually responsible for linking out to 8% of risky content. McAfee SiteAdvisor used numbers and searches from a May 2006 survey, and completed the same search last month and found that AOL took the safest honors, while Ask showed the biggest improvements.

The latest post at the Ask.com blog begins, "For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters." This is a promising start--I've occasionally been annoyed by the fact that Google interprets almost all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces--but then things go off in a different direction: emoticons. I really wasn't aware that there were so many people crying out for a way to find the meanings of certain emoticons, but apparently there are. As a result, you can now search for :) or >:-( or :-O and Ask.com will tell you, via what it calls the Smart Answer box, what it's supposed to mean. Ask.com doesn't really say how many emoticons it knows, but it does seem to be missing some like :-[ and it also doesn't seem to differentiate between upper- and lowercase, so it interprets :-d as the same as :-D ("laughing, big smile"). It does, however, toss at least one non-emoticon into the mix, which the geeks in the audience will recognize: /. , as well as some popular acronyms like LOL and BRB. It even has WTF (uncensored!) but not, curiously, OMG.

Bloglines, the immensely popular web-based feed reader owned by Ask.com, launched its long-awaited blog search engine yesterday. The search can be accessed from both the Bloglines and Ask.com web sites, with slightly different interfaces. Bloglines' search adds a "+" button next to each search result that lets you preview posts in their entirety and a "more info" link that shows a cute pop-up with the feed's number of Bloglines subscribers and any citations for the post. Both search pages have a few advanced options, including filtering by date, sorting by date, relevance, or popularity, and including or excluding news. It also has the obvious (but welcome) integration with Bloglines, allowing you to subscribe to feeds (the Ask.com version also lets you subscribe with Google Reader, NewsGator, or My Yahoo!), "clip" posts, and post them to del.icio.us, Digg, or Newsvine. Not bad.

[Thanks, Andreas!]

A lot flew beneath my radar last week, including, unfortunately, a great post by TechCrunch's Frank Gruber called Comparing the Mapping Services, in which he compares, with some nice screenshots and tables, the big five online map services: Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and MapQuest. Gruber praises all of the services, but in the end he says (spoiler alert!), "Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API options." What's the best online map service for your money?