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With the deal closed on the Dictionary.com purchase, Ask.com has now become, at least according to comScore, the ninth-largest web property. The all-cash deal originally began back in mid-May and had Ask.com purchasing Lexico Publishing Group LLC. The web properties that were included were Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.

Ask.com is reporting that this will give them an increase of around 15 million additional users on a month basis, which would put them up to a monthly audience of around 145 million. Terms of the acquisition, such as how much was paid were not disclosed.

Read [Reuters]

As the ads for the drug Cymbalta say, “Depression hurts.” A new study out of the University of Bristol suggests that doing a web search for information about a certain permanent solution is not a good idea.  The search engines that were used were Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.  For each search engine, 12 searches using simple terms were performed, and the top 10 results of each search were taken for a total of 480 search results in the study.  Sadly, only 13% of the results were about suicide prevention, and the top 3 hits for each search engine were pro-suicide (the fourth was Wikipedia).  According to the researchers, it appears that safety controls by ISP’s aren’t as effective as they should be and that rather, search engine optimization is the way to go.

The 12 search terms were not given in the Reuters article, and obviously search terms make all the difference as to what results turn up.  However, since the researchers were trying to put themselves in the shoes of someone contemplating suicide, the last thing they would think about is how advanced the query is.  I could also see why they used only the four search engines and didn’t include some of the original search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, and Excite to get some more results, because the four search engines are what people most likely use.  But of the four search engines, MSN ranked highest for suicide prevention and support sites, so to me this is saying that going with an underdog yields more responsible results.  Of course though I think everyone would agree that if you rely on the Internet for information, it’s best to go directly to a trusted health website and bypass the search engines altogether, or if you don’t know of any dedicated health websites, to get help offline the old-fashioned way.

Read [Revolution Health]

Is that the sound of bubbles popping I hear? Ask.com has announced that it is cutting 40 jobs in a restructuring move.

“Today, we unveiled a new direction for Ask.com,” Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Safka said in a statement. “Moving forward, we will focus on our core customers, and what they come to Ask.com for most: answers. Our loyal base of 45 million unique users come to Ask.com for answers at a rate that is three times more than any other major search engine.”

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Ask has launched a news page, being called “Big News” they will aggregate and display top news stories from around the web. The stories will be pulled from a variety of sites both big and small, ranging everywhere from the small blog up to The New York Times. They even have some integration with Digg.com, on the bottom of the page you are shown the “Top 5 Diggs in the News” and also five stories that have yet to be Dugg, offering you the option to “Be The First.”

According to Ask the listed news stories will be “dynamically generated” and are based on a variety of factors to include freshness, source authority, social media references, article content, and multimedia availability. The sections and categories will also be able to be tracked and followed via RSS with lots of details shown during mouse overs while on the Big News page. While the social news section has many other competitors, Ask has a nice offering with what appears to be both a clean and easy-to-use interface.

Read [Ask “Big News”] Via [CNET]

Ask has just added the ability to skin the search page with personally uploaded images. Skins were first introduced last year as part of the Ask3D package, however users were able to skin the search page only with a standard set of images. According to Ask “millions-of-people” have been “skinning to their hearts’ content” and have been requesting the ability to upload their own images. Ask has listened and its now here, beginning today users can now take advantage of the new upload feature on skins. The upload process is fairly easy, however a nice set of directions are over on the Ask.com Blog.

Read [The Ask.com Blog]

Ask has released a mobile directions service called Click To Speak. This will allow users to enter an address using your voice instead of typing it out. Simply speak the city and state, then the street address for both your destination and also your starting point.

To use the new Click To Speak just visit http://m.ask.com from your mobile browser, click the Directions link, then click on the speak the address option. Once there you will just hit “Continue” and you will then begin the voice prompts, after you finish you will receive a text message with the details of your directions. The directions are available in either a list view or turn-by-turn view and can even be switched back and forth between driving and walking routes.

With just a quick test myself it seems pretty good, check out the video below for a quick walk through.

Ask Mobile with Dial Directions from xbrendanx on Vimeo.

Read [Ask.com Blog]