Ask.com advertising on Google

I was looking for info on raccoons and on the right...

[weeks]

It said:

Raccoon
Use the New Ask.com to find it.
Save time. Search better.
www.ask.com

So, I clicked on it, and it was better. But, sheeee, that's kind of lame, don't you think. Or, really aggressive. I like Ask. But, I'm use to G. (The only other ads, on both Ask and G, was an ad for Raccoon halloween costumes.)

[rustybrick]

Very impressive Ask.com, long tail!

[weeks]

I got to thinking about it--that has got to be the weirdest ad buy on Google ever. The meeting should have been interesting.

"OK, what keywords do we buy?"
"Everything. What's the budget on that."
"One zillion dollars--paid to our primary competition, BTW."
"Hmmmm. Maybe we should target our buys instead."

So, what are the doing, do you think? How about this: on keywords people are buying ads on Ask, drive traffic from Google to provide a happy experience for the ad buyer. Make sense? Perhaps throw in some areas where Ask really excels over Google, too.

I've decided that buying ads on your competition is a good idea in this case. Interesting that G will allow it. But, then, it only enhances their reputation and it makes money, so what the heck, eh?

[Bewenched]

Well they've certainly been advertising on television in the southern US as well.

[shorebreak]

I'll bet Ask knows exactly what it's doing. They may have had marketshare issues in the past, but as part of Barry Diller's IAC now I'm sure there's a goal they're trying to get to that this effort facilitates.

Remember, Ask can monetize traffic directly *and* indirectly by exposing searchers to other IAC businesses:

LendingTree (mortgage/finance lead gen)
ServiceMagic (the EBay of home services)
Pronto (upstart comparison shopping engine)
Match.com (top 5 dating site)
ReserveAmerica (campground reservations)
Ticketmaster (tickets)
Citysearch (local search)
Home Shopping Netwokr (infomercials)
etc, etc, etc

-Shorebreak

[BillyS]

Ask has been extremely busy indexing my site for the past two months and my site is no longer "stale" on Ask.

This is a sleeper SE right now. They're doing more things better than Y! and Google each month.

[pele]

Ooh... noticed that they have my amazon affiliate linked images in their images section. Guess I need to remove my disallow all images command in the robots.txt

Might pay off to let them keep them.

:)

The searches still need to update for my sites. Some are pretty old cached pages.