With the deal closed on the Dictionary.com purchase, Ask.com has now become, at least according to comScore, the ninth-largest web property. The all-cash deal originally began back in mid-May and had Ask.com purchasing Lexico Publishing Group LLC. The web properties that were included were Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. Ask.com is reporting that this will give more »

As the ads for the drug Cymbalta say, “Depression hurts.” A new study out of the University of Bristol suggests that doing a web search for information about a certain permanent solution is not a good idea. The search engines that were used were Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. For each search engine, 12 searches more »

Is that the sound of bubbles popping I hear? Ask.com has announced that it is cutting 40 jobs in a restructuring move.

“Today, we unveiled a new direction for Ask.com,” Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Safka said in a statement. “Moving forward, we will focus on our core customers, and what they come to Ask.com for most: answers. Our loyal base of 45 million unique users come to Ask.com for answers at a rate that is three times more than any other major search engine.”

Ask has launched a news page, being called “Big News” they will aggregate and display top news stories from around the web. The stories will be pulled from a variety of sites both big and small, ranging everywhere from the small blog up to The New York Times. They even have some integration with Digg.com, more »

Ask has just added the ability to skin the search page with personally uploaded images. Skins were first introduced last year as part of the Ask3D package, however users were able to skin the search page only with a standard set of images. According to Ask “millions-of-people” have been “skinning to their hearts’ content” and more »

Ask has released a mobile directions service called Click To Speak. This will allow users to enter an address using your voice instead of typing it out. Simply speak the city and state, then the street address for both your destination and also your starting point. To use the new Click To Speak just visit more »