How Will IAC Purchase Change Ask?

When the week began, those who follow the search engine industry were greeted with news of Ask.com's impending purchase by IAC, owner of Internet properties like Ticketmaster and Expedia.com. The sale was made for a reported at about $1.85 billion, not a bad sum for the 4th place search engine.

WebProWorld As with any transaction of this magnitude, many wonder what's going to become of the property being purchased. Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, shed some light on this subject, "Joining IAC will enable us to play on a much larger field. We are excited about the opportunity to serve as the connection between IAC's constellation of leading online properties to share users and content. Ask Jeeves will now be in an even stronger position to aggressively grow market share." Apparently, IAC's goal is to integrate Ask's search technology into their existing location-sensitive Internet properties, creating one of the largest pools of local information, and local-based queries on the Internet. This was more or less outlined in the press release: "making Ask Jeeves the search engine with the best local search, content and merchant information on the Web - increasing the distribution of IAC Local merchants and enhancing Ask Jeeves' local offering." Reactions to the merger vary. Most of the message board sentiments are quite supportive of the purchase considering the upcoming influx of cash. However, on the Nacho Hernandez asked whether or not Diller's infusion of money would actually improve Ask's search product: "I think the only question that comes to my mind is, can Barry Diller or any other millionaire mogul make this search engine gain enough market share to make Ask/Teoma be part of a group that could be called the Big 4'?" But improving Ask the search engine may not be the goal. Some believe name brand integration may be the driving force behind the acquisition. These thoughts were echoed on the suggesting Diller should actually be selling the newly acquired Ask property "First, any big acquisition makes it harder for investors to do proper year-over-year comparisons of financial results. IAC latest search news.