Ask.com acquires Lexico Publishing Group for $100m

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Web Blog

Saturday, 17 May 2008

Commonly known as the 4th largest search engine in the world, Ask.com has picked up a group of reference web sites to expand its market share of the online search pie.

With a $100m offer, Ask.com announced on Thursday that it would acquire Lexico Publishing Group, the owner of a network of web sites which include Dictionary.com, Reference.com and Thesaurus.com. The move is expected to increase Ask.com traffic by 11% worldwide and 9% in the UK.

Ask has also trimmed its work force by 8% in March as part of the move to remain competitive against Google, which has climbed towards 70% of all U.S searches [according to online consumer behavior analyst by comScore]. The earlier strategy in March was also to focus on women above 30 and questions related to health and entertainment. By going back to basic and focussing on answering straight forward questions, the acquisition is now seen as a natural addition to Ask's direction.

According to comScore, Dictionary.com drew 22.1 million visitors worldwide in March. Previously there was a proposed deal from Answers, parent of Answer.com to purchase Lexico. But the deal was called off when financing was not secured.

With Ask's recent acquisition, we can probably see the search engine taking up for a more visible position in the fiercely competitive search industry now.

How to promote your website in China

Friday, 15 February 2008

If the Chinese can be your potential customers and your site cannot be found on the major search engines in China, you better do something about it.

Currently in China, Baidu.com is the most established search engine. Its search result is also distributed a strong network of popular websites. Google has grabbed some market share in recent years. Below is an overview:

Baidu [www.baidu.com ] - 62%
Google China [www.google.cn ] - 20%
Others (including Yahoo!, MSN & Sina) - 18%

*You may want to note that Sina.com is now having its search listings powered by Google.

Other important websites include the following:

www.163.com [News, entertainment, blogging etc]

www.alibaba.com [Business to Business portal]

www.sohu.com [news, blogging, entertainment, connectivity, mobile services]

There are various ways to get your site to be listed on these Chinese search engines and portals. However, we suggest that the fastest way is to include Chinese content in your website. Since you want to reach the Chinese, isn't it necessary to have Chinese content? If you can translate your English content into Chinese on your own, then you do not need any translaters. If not, you should get professional help to publish Chinese web pages.

Once you have done that, you may submit to Baidu.com using this url: www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html. Of course, submission does not guarantee inclusion. But if your site is having valuable Chinese content, it definitely makes things easier.

Another way is to get inbound links from other popular Chinese content websites that are already indexed by Chinese search engines.

If you are really not sure how to do it, our SEO consultants can do the submission for you though.

With more than 130 million Internet users, China may soon represents the largest online community in the near future.

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