It's been reported that Ask.com has agreed to acquire privately-held Lexico Publishing - the company that owns word-heavy sites Dictionary.com, Thesauras.com and Reference.com - for an estimated $100 million. According to the Guardian, the move will increase Ask.com's traffic by 11% globally and 9% in the UK, an increase that the company will hope could push them closer to the Search World's biggest players and which would justify the price tag - although the exact figure has not been confirmed by the search engine.
Ask.com claimed that March figures from comScore revealed that Ask Network (comprising all of the company's web properties), received around 145 million monthly unique users. Putting them ahead of sites such as Facebook and ranking them as the ninth most popular website in the world. The addition of Ask.com's reported 15 million visitors in the same month must have proved tempting.
The benefits of the acquisition for the search engine could be numerous, Dictionary.com sells ads and Ask.com has an advertising deal with Google - so Ask.com may be able to increase ad revenue. Moreover, the deal could serve as a way to generate more traffic for Ask.com as the sites will attempt to cycle traffic between them.
Apparently the search engine plans to create reference synergy, a fair point when you discover that 'dictionary' was the second most searched for term on the site last year. Jim Safka, Ask.com's chief executive said:
"More than 30% of all searches conducted on Ask.com are in the reference category."
This is just the latest move in Ask.com's offensive to drag itself out of forth place in the search engine rankings - languishing behind Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft at first, second and third respectively. Recent attempts have included plans to focus on a predominantly female market with limited success - maybe this acquisition will give them the clout they needs to continue snapping at Microsoft's heels.
