Jim Lanzone Leaves Ask to Join Redpoint Ventures as Entrepreneur in Residence

Rustybrick reports that Jim Safka has taken over as CEO of Ask.com and that Jim Lanzone has joined Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence. Some point to the recent increase traffic at ask.com traffic and ask why? It’s hard to tell exactly what terms Jim left under, nevertheless it’s great to see that he either left on his own or was given time to set up this new gig at Redpoint Ventures (if so class move by Mr. Diller). I promise not to overload you with business plan ideas right away but hey reach out to me via phone sometime soon…

In theory, the email admin guy only has to change the email account password - but time will tell there. :)

Mr. Safka is notable as the first Top 10 MBA executive of a major search engine (someone correct me if I’m wrong on this) and he gets points in my book for having spent time in Chicago as well as his Top 10 MBA is from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

IAC /Ask.com gave full text bios of Mr. Safka and other executive appointments:

Jim Safka has been named CEO of Ask.com. Effective immediately, he will oversee Ask.com’s global operations. He will also continue in his role as CEO of Primal Ventures, a new-venture entity that identifies seeds and incubates business opportunities for IAC.

Mr. Safka, 39, served as CEO of Match.com from 2004 to 2006. Under his leadership, the company grew revenue and operating income before amortization at an annual rate of 25% and 52% respectively. Today, Match.com has more than 15 million members in 35 countries. Prior to Match.com, he held senior management roles at AT&T Wireless and E*TRADE Financial Corporation, and brand and product management positions at Intuit, Alberto-Culver, Inc., Warner Bros. Inc., and Paramount Pictures. Mr. Safka holds an MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a BS in accounting from the University of Southern California.

Scott Garell has been named President of Ask.com, where he will report to Mr. Safka and manage daily business operations worldwide. Since 2005, Mr. Garell has been CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals. Under his leadership the Consumer Applications and Portals businesses (including Fun Web Products, Portals, Evite and Pronto) have grown by 74% in the past 3 years.

Prior to his role as CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, Mr. Garell, 42, served as Executive Vice President of domestic sites and search, where he managed the division’s destination sites (Ask.com, iWon, and My Way), as well as the optimization of its proprietary information retrieval technologies and products across all brands. Mr. Garell joined IAC Search & Media in April 2004 as Senior Vice President of Marketing. Formerly, Mr. Garell served in senior roles at Computer Associates, Citysearch and Clorox. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in political economy from the University of California at Berkeley.

John Park will replace Mr. Garell and is named President of IAC Consumer Applications and Portals, which includes Smiley Central, Webfetti, Zwinky, My Fun Cards, CursorMania, Popular Screensavers, Excite.com, iWon, and My Way. Mr. Park is currently Executive Vice President and General Manager of Toolbars and Portals at IAC Consumer Applications & Portals and has served in various senior management roles in the company since 1999. Under his leadership, the Fun Web Products Business has become one of the fastest growing businesses at IAC.

Mr. Park, 38, joined IAC Search; Media from Interactive Search Holdings, which he joined in 1999 as Group Vice President of Product Management and where he was responsible for the original development of iWon.com and MyWay.com, as well as the revamping of Excite.com following the 2001 acquisition of the brand from @Home. Prior to ISH, Mr. Park held senior product development and management roles at Ameritrade, Prodigy Services and New York Web. He earned a BS in Information Systems and Management from New York University.

Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media and Advertising since January 2007, will continue to oversee IAC Advertising Solutions as well as Evite, Pronto, IAC Mobile and Ask Sponsored Listings.

Mr. Horan, 52, has spent more than 30 years in media and advertising. As CEO of About.com he pioneered the company’s turnaround and its sale to The New York Times Company. He served as President & CEO of DevX.com, an Internet media company that was later acquired by JupiterMedia Corporation. Mr. Horan spent 10 years at International Data Group, a global technology media company, where he spearheaded relationships with top advertisers and served as Senior Vice President and Publisher of Computerworld. Prior to that, he spent more than 15 years in senior account management roles at leading advertising agencies, including BBDO and Ogilvy & Mather.

I look forward to meeting and learning about all these new senior Ask.com executives and their plans. Good luck to Jim Lanzone, Jim Safka and everyone else in their new roles.

Ask Launches AskEraser

Ask.com today officially announces AskEraser. What’s AskEraser?

When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries.

An AskEraser link is featured prominently in the upper right corner of the Ask.com homepage and search results pages – clearly and constantly indicating to the user that their search activity will be ‘erased’ from Ask.com servers. AskEraser remains ‘on’ for searches conducted across Ask.com’s major search verticals: Web, Images, AskCity, News, Blogs, Video, and Maps & Directions - and can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ by the user at anytime.

AskEraser is a switch that enables you to turn off tracking on Ask.com, it’s located in the upper right have corner of Ask.com…


Is this important? Yes. Will it convert users to Ask.com? Yes, but I don’t know when the tidal wave will occur.

What do you mean by you don’t know exactly when? What I mean is this an event driven asset that is likely to drive conversions of people when Google or another search engine has a larger data or privacy breach that creates considerable news. These types of things are almost guaranteed to happen in the future, but does that mean today or a decade from now? I can’t tell ya that. In the meantime, Ask.com should continue to build budget for evangelist assets to convert one new user at a time - using the concept of “not how many but who” as Seth Godin points out in his new book Meatball Sundae. Good luck to Ask with the effort.

Barry Schwartz has a nice write up as well at Search Engine Land.

Some people have questioned the ability to have both privacy and bookmarks, a comment on Andy Beal’s blog asks this question:

Allen Taylor Says:
Yes, and there’s another reason this isn’t such great news. In order to use MyStuff you have to turn AskEraser off, which brings up an important personal security question. What if I save a website to MyStuff? Will the query performed to find that website be erased when I turn AskEraser back on? It seems I have a choice: I can have privacy or I can have bookmarks, but I can’t have both.

Could someone from Ask, say Gary Price or Patrick, please clarify this issue by answering Allen’s question?

Happy Thanksgiving 2007

As always Rustybrick has a great holiday logo summary.

My only add on is the following. Take a minute to read the full history of the holiday - it’s not about a day off and football.

Ad Age Interviews IAC’s Barry Diller

Last week, I wrote about the breakup of IAC by Barry Diller. At the time I stated:

He’s quite animated and interesting to listen to, I wish he did loosely structured calls like this more often.

Today Adage released an interview with Mr. Diller. In it he adds some sensibility to the Facebook valuation discussions, confirms that the Google sponsored listings deal is for five years and discusses how he’d like to buy AOL. I’d love to pick his brain on the future of Ask in a more detailed interview. It’s clear that he is shaking up a lot of things and it will be interesting to watch this breakup as it progresses for clues as to how the company will be run going forward.

Ad Age: You in the past have had a pretty good grasp on speculation. What do you think of the valuations being thrown around about a site like Facebook?

Mr. Diller: Those are not valuations based on anything fundamental; those are valuations based upon rather enormous hopes and dreams. Not that they won’t necessarily come true, but at this point, that’s what they are in terms of revenue and profits getting to the level that would sustain a very high asset value. … The physics would demand that this becomes more rational at some point, I think maybe sooner rather than later. But again, that’s a prediction based on nothing but hot air, to mix many different metaphors.

Ad Age: I can’t let you go without asking about Ask. Are you happy with how Ask.com is doing?

Mr. Diller: We feel great. We’ve been able to grow queries second only to Google. We’ve increased retention, frequency. All the metrics for Ask are very good. Now we have a new five-year arrangement with Google on the sponsored listings that’s going to be very, very remunerative to us. Ask is going to be able to continue to innovate.

IAC Split Up Conference Call Summary

In the call it was stated that Barry Diller will continue as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC. There are a ton of other reports. I won’t repeat all of that, I’ll just point out the conference call highlights. He’s quite animated and interesting to listen to, I wish he did loosely structured calls like this more often.

- The new metric is query growth - I find that to a strong signal about ask.com and other properties

- On Video - there is so much runway ahead

- Mobile - nobody has really started yet

- Internet advertising is effective and trackable

This is an exciting change for IAC, look for good things in 2008.

Will You Attend SMX Local & Mobile Denver Next Week

I’ll be attending the first ever SMX Local & Mobile conference next week in Denver!!! Chris Sherman, who talks about why he is excited about the event in this post, and Greg Sterling have both put in a tremendous amount of work into researching and programming this highly unique and special event.

You may view the full agenda and you may still register for the event.

I arrive at Noon on Sunday (where is the Sunday pre-conference meetup - The Hyatt?) and hope to meet with as many attendees as possible before and during the event as I look forward to learning about people and seeing the demos in this soon to be revolutionary space.

See you in Denver! I’ll also have room for one or two on the way back to the airport as I’m renting a car while there.

Bloglines Version 3.0 Beta Launched

Bloglines has relaunched with with a quicker and cleaner interface based on my short period of new usage this morning. I’m checking it out more right now. Gary Price has a nice summary of the new features at Resourceshelf and there is the official Bloglines announcement.

On a related topic, you may have noticed that I’ve relaunched my blog’s RSS feed using Feedburner’s Mybrand feature, I’ll be writing a more detailed post someday when I wrap up some last loose ends and have time.  The correct RSS feed that you should please switch to is now: http://feeds.daviddalka.com/DavidDalka

If you have a Bloglines account, please add my new feed to Bloglines. If you don’t, I’d ask that you please test out your new Bloglines account with my new feed as your test run.

SES San Jose - Conference Networking Tip

Yesterday I met Henry Li who recently joined Ask.com as a Director in Business Development.

How and why did I meet him?

Did I walk up to him and introduce myself? No.

Was he wearing Ask.com clothing? No.

OK, tell me how you met him then…

Simple. I always carry an extension cord with me to allow me to share the all too scarce conference power sources. This has the added benefit of having an extra outlet or two handy for other people. Henry walked up to me and asked if he could plug in. Then we chatted and learned that we had a common Wall Street / Financial Services background.

Nice to meet you Henry! Talk to you again soon.

SES San Jose 2007 Day 2 - Images & Search Engines

I was going to attend this session but I arrived late because I was having a great conversation about his new project.

After yesterday’s speech by Greg Jarboe during the Universal Search session I knew this session would be popular. I had no idea that I could not even get a seat in a really hot room!!! Wow!

Shari Thurow, who just wrote a new book on this subject, and Chris Smith from Netconcepts gave great talks before I escaped for fresh air in the exhibit hall.

Fortunately, other folks that got seats did some great write ups of the session.

SES San 2007 Jose Day 1 - Universal & Blended Vertical Search

Moderator:

Speakers:

Q&A Speakers:

Quite likely the busiest session of the day to the fullest house. One can’t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn’t have designed it to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues. The implications and transformation for universal search are still evolving, but they are clearly changing the landscape. One other thing that became clear from this event was that Ask is becoming a serious contender in this marketplace.

 

Greg Jarboe –

Universal search is the biggest event since “Florida” update. 70% of what I used to know is now obsolete. The patterns are not yet clear in personalization.

News results ranked #4 if you searched for the term iPhone on June 29

In the #8 position, was a Youtube video. We don’t know if it was done on purpose.

July 17, Rupert Murdoch – news with image – brings up a whole new reputation management – be prepared to optimize images.

Early chapters of Henry Potter were leaked, the blog results are on page one of results

Investor relations now is moving to the front page of Countrywide. Few companies have complete control of their brands now on Google.

Unflattering images of Hillary Clinton and that vast right wing conspiracy is building links to unflattering results.

Blogs on Hurricane Dean already on front page. Images will likely come next.

All of the rules have been rewritten – how do I research this? Focus on the upper left links. News seems to be on the top left all the time. Search remains #1 way journalist find information about a company.

Newsknife and Google News Report – be checking this. Your PR people aren’t ready for that yet. If you are not giving a jpg file in a release, start now.

Google News right now doesn’t do video news. Likely to create that.

Social mapping tools can help identify most influential bloggers. In certain categories they show up.

A couple of years ago there was vertical creep session here at SES – I now rank for that term. Not a good thing.

You can’t afford to ignore Universal Search Today

Google is making specialized or vertical content more visible through Universal Search

Sherwwod Stranieri, Catalyst Online

This throws a lot of  curves into the theme. Ask 3D and Google cut new paths.

Conventional web pages that once rank well are going to move around maybe down. Other things will move updates.

Number of videos is significant in the Youtube world. Are the search engines using comments as an indicator?

We are looking at it as search marketers. Showed client example.

How to look at it: Google PR, Y! Page links, keyword phrases in tags.

Videos ranking correspond well with views, comments, etc.

Bill Slawski

Why does news, images and video show up there.

I’m not sure I see this all as a revolutionary concept. How do we get out content into our results.

Showed examples of screen prints from each engine for the word spider.

Showed the Google patent, oddly looks quite different than Google’s universal search does now.

Google acquired several Infoseek patents.

Discussed Onebox and log file data.

Ranking in Vertical databases – how do you rank for that vertical?

User behavior – key value pairs, be certain definition and being defined. Questions and Answers work the same way. Html formatting may play a role.

Enhancing the user experiences.

David Bailey – Google
Technical lead for the vertical search.

What are our goals?

Make google.com the search box of first resort.

Display special features for special results

Keep it fast. Keep it simple. Above all, keep it relevant.

Showed example: origami crane

This will continually improve and extend to more result types.

It’s still about the web.

But: think about creating quality content in other forms. Expect similar SEO guidelines to apply.

Create quality content, describe it well and we’ll see what happens.

Tim Mayer, VP Product Management

We are transitioning to a better optimized user experience

Freshness and user intent became relevancy issues.

News, local and other verticals – the possibilities are infinite. Federation plays a role.

Some implantation examples:

Music Artist Shortcut

Movie Shortcut

Hotel Shortcut Inline

Consumer Electronics Shortcut

As we go forward, it’s going t be more about the intent of the searchers.

Eric Collier, Director of Product Management

“We are the scrappy innovator of search.”

Ask.com 3D: SERP Design

We moved the content up top and removed the top links.

Large jumps in user satisfaction seen in both the site analytics and surveys

Increase in vertical channel usage

Starting to see a reduction of multiple query sessions around the same keyword term.

Expect to see a larger percentage of SERPs with blended results

User location will play a larger roles in SERPs

Expect to see fewer web results in SERPs

Blogs, Images and Video results will take online reputation into account when ranking

Pay attention to other search drivers

 

Other coverage of this important session:

RB Digital Boots

Rustybrick

AIM Clear Blog

Lee Odden’s Toprankblog

 

Bonus coverage:

Lee Odden interviews Tim Mayer

 

 

Death of Blog Search Part 2 - Sifry Leaves Technorati

Techcrunch, Alarm clock and even Jason Calacanis weighed in on David Sifry’s departure. Jason extrapolated into some things that I don’t agree with completely, except with his suggestion that Web 2.0 companies try to make a profit, but I’ll leave that alone for now.

David Sifry today announced that he has stepped down as CEO of Technorati. While the search for a new CEO continues, Teresa Malo (CFO), Dorion Carroll (VP-Engineering), and Derek Gordon (VP-Marketing), will manage the day-to-day operations of the company. Sifry will become “Chairman of Technorati’s board”. What does it ultimately prove? It again clearly demonstrates that Internet experience is not the primary indicator of Internet executive future success.

Hello people. Technorati did a redesign that refocused on mainstream media as I noted in my earlier post the death of blog search. Then Technorati used tags to grow traffic from other search properties. As Arrington asked in early June “When will the Technorati traffic party end?” Apparently Google and others took notice of this and the party ended in July based on Alexa data - I’m surprised Michael did not discuss this at length today in his post actually. This dip exposed the payday to payday advertising dollar budgeting leading to the departure of Sifry and 8 others. It should be noted that this followed the dismissal of several other employees during the July 4th holiday.

Looking at a May 9th Mashable post, it seems that around $1 million was raised when it expanded a round of funding from 10.52 Million to 11.52 Million. It appears that Technorati was spending more cash than it was taking in, even before the traffic decline in July, based on the early July layoffs. The traffic decline in July only made that situation worse.

This leaves Technorati in the unenviable position of needing to generate new advertising dollars at a time when the engineering needs an overhaul it can’t afford. Repairs such as Typepad blog overcounting, flawed link metrics and many other flaws can not occur at this time.

In fact, someone suggested to me in a phone conversation today that perhaps they should shut Technorati off completely now and just sell it’s likely most valuable asset - a 301 redirect of the Technorati domain. The talk of taking Technorati public via IPO will likely be nothing more than that talk in David Sifry’s previous blog posts.

So where is a blog searcher to go now?

Ask - They have recently revamped their offering dramatically and comment search is now combined with post search. It is an offering that is available directly on their front page.

Google - They should move blog search to the front page as I suggested previously and ideally should build and option to show it mixed with news sites.

Icerocket - Plain, simple, no nonsense blog search.

Other players like Topix, if they were to index the blogosphere fully, could also emerge as an alternative that would properly mix news and blogs together demonstrating that most news is being lifted from blogs by the mainstream media.

University of Michigan Consumer Satisfaction Index Report 2007

The report is out. Greg Sterling has a great write up at Search Engine Land. Congrats to Yahoo! and Ask on their improvements!

However, the numbers are extremely fine and as Greg asked the authors, “Why the disconnect between the satisfaction data and market share?” The other thing that should be pointed out is that these numbers are not that granular in nature. My advice is to take these numbers with a grain of salt as they may of may not result in the market share changes they suggest over the next 12-24 months. Essentially the question is will this report cause people to talk about switching over dinner with family and friends tonight?

Search Engine Strategies San Jose - Silicon Valley August 19-23

I look forward to seeing all of my wonderful search engine, mobile search and mobile advertising friends next week at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose!  While I’ll definitely be in Mountain View for the Google Dance (hopefully they won’t run out of XL t-shirts in 2 minutes like last year), I’m unsure whether I’ll make it to Palo Alto, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Oakland, Monterey or Santa Cruz to visit and see some other awesome things. I do hope to make it to Barcamp Block.

Who else will be there and what spontaneous events, product launches and parties are you looking most forward to? I’m getting very close to some of my goals! I look forward to seeing you.

IAC Leaves DoubleClick for Atlas

Clickz has the details here…

Mossberg: Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results

Interesting read - you should check it out.

Here is the cliff notes version:

“Both of the new systems are designed to spare users the extra steps needed in the past to view different types of content related to the same search term. But Google combines these different types of content into one list. Ask puts them on one page in separate sections, which I find to be the superior approach, because each type of result is displayed more effectively; it’s easier to see at a glance what you have.”

Newly Relaunched Ask.com Glimpses of Greatness and Some Problems

Searchengineland, The Ask.com Blog, TechCrunch, John Battelle, The New York Times, Scoble and others apparently got an advance memo and briefing regarding Ask’s new product. Their reviews focus on the interface changes instead of the actual substance, mine will focus on the actual quality of the search data I experienced.

Not surprisingly, Gary Price of Ask has the most detailed coverage. I’m not going to go through each item as you can read his post. It’s great to see them being scrappy and innovating - it looks like it is a fun time to be working at Ask as they’ve clearly decided to not stay with the status quo.

Let’s start with what I love about the changes:

- Blog search is featured on the front page! This is one of my wishes for all search engines. If they added an option to aggregate News and Blogs together that would totally rock as a next step.

- With Google’s recent home page redesign, the simple interface which resembles the old Google layout can’t be categorized as a ripoff. Awesome timing for this change to be made. Props.

OK, what is weak then? Well let’s start with the fact that at SES Chicago last year, Ask City, was launched. When someone inquired as to why I hadn’t blogged about it, I told the senior person that I had not received the memo, advance notice and was not invited to the Ask City launch party so I had no basis to write anything. That person told me that I would be added to the list to receive future communications and he took the time to introduce me to an Ask publicist who obviously has not followed up on that promise as of the six month mark. It is a shame because I’ve loved all my interactions with the people from Ask when they have occurred.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but here are my first three concerns that need attention before I’d consider playing with it much deeper on a regular basis.

- Ask’s search bot doesn’t index my site regularly and it’s not indexed thoroughly and completely enough. According to my stats in May the Googlebot visited 812 times, MSN/Live visited 899 times, Yahoo! visited 2030 times. Ask’s bot? It visited a mere 63 times. Sigh. Ask still isn’t asking my site for enough data to index it fully.

- A word about that blog search, it’s nice that you have my feeds. It’s nice that you show relevant links to me and comments. However at the moment a search on my first and last name in the post section doesn’t show my posts! Yikes.

- Longtime readers of my blog know that my title used to start with David “Dsquared” Dalka. As much as I love that nickname, I dropped it in the blog title sometime in late 2006 because it was driving a ton of one page visitors from Italy that were clearly looking for something else. (BTW, anyone know what that means there?) OK, so Dave what does this have to do with Ask? The entry for my blog on a web search on Ask still contains the old title. If Ask indexed my site regularly this likely would not be the case.

The good news is that I’m confident these a issues are easy to fix with a little attention. I look forward to seeing progress on these issues shortly and hearing from Ask on these issues.

UPDATE: The Ask.com blog didn’t accept my trackback. Why?