LookSmart has secured a renewed AdCenter license with Ask.com and will continue to provide the required components for Ask.com’s Sponsored Listings PPC (pay-per-click) advertising program. The license has been extended until year 2009. It seems that Ask.com has became one of the most important partners for LookSmart since it lost MSN’s partnership in 2004. In matter of fact, AdCenter is considered as a success product of LookSmart, besides their own vertical search engine. With the AdCenter, an advertiser including Ask.com’s subscribers can leverage on the segmented, and demographically focused customers and hence, sustain the profitable growth.

It will be a win-win situation for LookSmart and Ask.com. In other word, both of these two companies can further growing their businesses and revenues are forecast to rise in the next two years. “We’re focused on delivering results for our advertisers and AdCenter is one component of our overall strategy,” said James Speer, vice president of search marketing products at IAC Advertising Solutions. On the other hand, the CEO of LookSmart, David Hills said, “The AdCenter provides Ask.com a solid platform to grow and service its advertiser base and revenue in a cost-effective manner. We’re proud to be associated with their success.” According to the Yahoo! News.

The other day I came across a new service offered by Bloglines, it is the so-called “Image Wall” that enable the users to search the blog content by simply click on the image listed in Image Wall. Bloglines is a well-established online service that allowed people to search, subscribe, create and share news feeds, blogs and rich content on the web. It is so popular and has eventually been acquired by Ask Jeeves (Now: IAC Search & Media) in year 2005. On the Image Wall webpage, you can see that there is a totally 24 thumbnails showed in one direction (from left to right and in top-down manner). When an user click on the image, it will bring the user to the image’s URL, i.e. blog itself. But before an user enter to the site, he/she must agree that “You are over the age of 18 and understand that the material included in the Image Wall may involve language, content, images, and themes of an adult or controversial nature.” According to the agreement listed on the Image Wall.

I visited the Bloglines’ News page, the Bloglines Team said the Image Wall is a whole new way to discover new content. It’s interesting — sometimes mesmerizing — and just plain fun.

I agreed.

I just came across this report (pdf) from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google and Ask.com are the fastest-growing search engines based on the number of U.S. searches. This report showed growth of 23 percent and 25 percent respectively in October 2006, compared with the year before. In market share, it showed Ask.com in fifth place, just behind AOL.

Though Ask.com they are not updated their index as quickly as Google, and even when I search my own weblog through them, it showed no result with TagEdge.com (up to this moment), however they did provided a different search experience for me. Whenever I want to search a working paper, the results showed the information that I want for me in a fast manner without having to enter an elaborate boolean search query.

I believed in the search industry, Ask.com has thus established their credibility as the most significant challenger to Google. They are more user-friendly, attributed to their fewer advertisements strategy. They do not believe this search business is about advertising. Thus, the concept of “fail to compete on advertising is to fail” is not valid in Ask.com.

When you look at their technology. The Smart Answers for the purpose of suggested links; the Zoom feature that allows people to narrow or broaden a search; Binoculars that offers a web page’s preview; the walking directions from their map services; the “ExpertRank”, a totally different ranking system when compared to PageRank of Google, and etc. They have improved a lot in their search engine. I wonder they offer social search?

For now, I’m just waiting for some of these underdogs, one of them is Ask.com inventing their technologies and turn themselves into significant players.