Ask.com Continuing To Play The Google Arbitrage Game

[atStart]

I saw the article on SearchEngineLand today titled "Is Ask.com Continuing To Play The Google Arbitrage Game?" about Ask and Google today. Anyone else noticed Ask.com buying up all the keywords in their industry?

[LucidSW]

First, Ask should be big and smart enough to know that arbitrage is a money loser.

Second, checking a few of their pages, I don't consider that arbitrage. It's not as if the ads are right there in your face. Also, most of their pages there would be little to no ads for it. The "how much water should I drink" page has 3 ads, none of which is related. Same for a few other pages I just checked.

Must be a slow news day at SEL for them to comment/complain about this.

I can tell you however that Ask does bid on generic terms to get people to their site judging by the Adwords auction insights report. They also use generic ads. I don't see how this can be profitable for them. Maybe they have the money and just don't care for now, simply wanting people to use their site.

[atStart]

According to a comment by Doug Leeds, ask.com CEO, in the comment section:

"We get traffic to Ask.com from many sources -- online and off -- and Google is just one part of our strategy. We are consistently collecting feedback from users who come to Ask via search advertising on Google, and the data shows that our experience is good compared to other advertisers on the page. For example, our advertisements on Google generate 200% higher retention, 33% higher time on site, and excellent customer satisfaction scores as compared against our competitors. You don't get those results by just sending people to pages with ads - we get them by making good on the promise of delivering answers. We don't do everything perfectly however, and I'm definitely all ears in terms of how we can continue to do things better."

[searchengineland.com ]

[Shepherd]

I just turned off "search partners" in a few campaigns because of ASK, seeing a lot over after hours crap coming from them. gotta fight with them for ad space on google and then pay them to send crap, no more.

[RhinoFish]

The "all ears" part is true. :-)

[snoopy1122]

Noticed this the other day, their ads typically rank low but the ones I have seen just go to another search page. Obviously they are still doing arbitrage in a big way. Shame on Google for allowing this.

[RhinoFish]

from wiki: [en.wikipedia.org...]

In 2010 Ask.com abandoned the search industry, with the loss of 130 search engineering jobs, because it could not compete against more popular search engines such as Google and Bing. It reverted to being essentially a question-and-answer repository, utilizing its extensive history of archived query data to search sites that provide answers to questions people have. To avoid a situation in which no answers were available from its own resources, the company outsourced to Google the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.