"The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon"
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/iac-third-quarter-25-percen...
They get a ton of distribution from software installers that ask if you want to install other stuff during the installation process.
Unfortunately I can't point to anything I searched for recently to back this assertion up.
"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.
Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.
Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."
[1]: http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-en... [2]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/iac-s-diller-surren...
Oh well, it's been a good run, I've been expecting something like this to go down for quite some time now. I'm actually surprised Diller hasn't pulled the plug yet for good.
I'm sad to see them go - they actually innovated a lot of the things Google ended up using (topic-specific link popularity as a concept, the preview pane, the 3 column layout for search, etc.). It sucks to be the first to do something right, then see the market leader simply take your ideas and run with it.
In other words, the free market system is working.
If ask.com and bing.com move out of the search space or turn off the lights (hypothetically), then those are two fewer companies competing with Google and driving their innovation. If you have many companies in the field, this isn't a huge deal, but search has (as far as I can remember) been dominated by a few giants, had a high barrier to entry, and seems to be shrinking every year. In this case, the market has done some good, but Google could always create a better search product - and if they didn't, then we would need competitors to do it.
"The free market system is working" really isn't a very nice response to "our company is desperately trying to maintain a revenue stream" (which is probably an exaggeration of ask.com's current financial situation).
It's sick how much money IAC is making from this crap.
On the other hand, I haven't used it for many years and haven't heard anything good about it either.
