Some good questions there. I was worried I might have missed out on some wedding invitations but what were the answers? I ended up going to Google (GOOG) instead, that got me thinking....
How does ask.com answer the question of what search engine is the best, ask.com is of course!
Ask.com is far and away the no. 4 player in search at just 3.5% market share behind GOOG, Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo. Ask.com does have a better chance since they acquired about.com, there are a lot of synergies between the two companies with search accounting for more than 50% of IACI's revenues. Its a nice niche focusing on answering questions, interestingly most of IACIs search revenue comes from an agreement with GOOG showing their adwords results to users.
I am just waiting for IACI to focus more on mobile. Mobile has been a major issue for most technology companies, IACI seem to be too focused on desktop toolbars and other PC centric services. The other major part of their business is online dating (they own match.com) another service that is not very mobile centric.
This lack of a mobile strategy is causing the company to trade near the bottom end of their historical multiple range at 12x. IACI's major shareholder Barry Diller is best known as the spin king (in a good way) famous for spinning off Expedia and then Trip Advisor, two companies which are now larger than IACI. Maybe its time for IACI to spin off some of their assets to reduce the conglomerate discount, that might help ease investors concerns over a lack of mobile strategy.
Jason
Disclosure: Decisive is long GOOG
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