Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Although Ask.com have been heavily advertising over the past few months in the US on television and also adding radio to the mix, in addition to online advertising, a ComScore report on search engine market share for September 2007 shows Ask.com at 4.7% of all searches in the US.
Given that Google ranks at 58.5%, followed by Yahoo at 22.9% and Microsoft at 9.7%, Ask.com clearly have a long way to go, with the new privacy feature one of the ways to differentiate themselves against competitors to get that magical larger share.
The Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology’s Deputy Director, Ari Schwartz, said of the AskEraser initiative: "We're extremely pleased to see a new breed of innovative, competitive tools that allow users greater control over their personal information and online experiences. Ask.com has taken an important step toward giving Internet users choice in how they control sensitive information about their online activities."
In the age of the Internet and the search engine, where seek and ye shall find rings more true than ever, Ask hope users will want seek at their website and find what they’re looking for, now more privately than any other engine to date.
Hoping to gain quick double digit growth may be asking for far too much, but with privacy’s spotlight growing ever brighter in light of the recent AOL search privacy breach, and concerns with what Google and others are doing with all their data, Ask.com are pushing the search envelope, challenging their competitors and are asking consumers to ask Ask.
Whether consumers will heed Ask.com’s call is yet to be seen, but anything that makes search better for consumers and better for privacy is a good thing for consumers, and is definitely a welcome development.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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