Some real perspectice...

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ask.com,+nytimes.com,+cn...

Facebook.com is beating Yahoo.com now, but whats more fun is Google...

Little misleading, comparing an english news site to a search engine, look at just USA:

http://grab.by/3LyC

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ask.com,+nytimes.com,+cn...

But search engine technology, with a few caveats, generally works across different languages and markets without too much work. It isn't really possible for NYT or CNN to just translate themselves into a 20 popular languages easily.

Serious question:

I've been using Quantcast to do these types of comparisons. Is there an advantage to Google Trends over Quantcast?

How much of this is toolbar spam?

I'm sure toolbar spam accounts for a lot of Ask's traffic, but we shouldn't see that here.

The graph shows the relative amounts of people who use Google to search for (i.e. navigate to) Ask, NYT, and CNN.

So, if toolbar spam is involved, it's Google's toolbar.

How much sense does it make to use one search engine's traffic to gauge usage of another's? Anyone with ask.com as their home page / default is not counted.

Hmm. I just checked with quantcast, and the graphs are similar: http://www.quantcast.com/ask.com http://www.quantcast.com/nytimes.com http://www.quantcast.com/cnn.com

also it gives an estimate of 110M visitors per month. Not too shabby.

If you extend alexa timeline to the max, you see a large spike at the end of 08 that drops dramatically in January of 09 and it's relatively flat from mid 09 to now.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ask.com%2F%3F...

If you look at the "also visited" tab - all of the sites listed are arbitrage crap.

Just for another random comparison: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=webcrawler.com,+excite.c...

It's a little amazing that iwon is gaining in market share...

Does anyone know if google gives users the ability to block entire domains from their search results? This is a feature that would benefit not only google, but also reedit, digg, and hacker news dare I say. I would block ask.com in a heartbeat.

What is the total value of the search market? What percentage does ask own?

3-5% depending on the stats provider.

People often ask me, Ask.com is still around? Yes, it is, and obviously it's bigger and doing better than some other things they do know of.

They had a brilliant television marketing campaign a summer or two ago coupled with an engaging design.