RIP - The End of Business.com and Ask.com

First, on November 9th we hear that Ask.com decided it no longer really wants to be a search engine. You can read more here - Ask.com Update from their blog (I think it is weird that the President of Ask.com decided to write his name in all caps, what is that supposed to mean?).

Then, 1 day later, on November 10th we hear that Business.com is going to 'realigned' into some other Dex One Offering. There press release is here - Dex One Realigns Interactive Operations

This after all the excitement of Yahoo! also deciding to get out of the search business earlier this year, has created a lot of change within the search space in such a short time. The problem is that as we lose things we seldom get anything back and/or if we do get a new web property it is usually never as good as something else we lost.

Hopefully, Blekko, a new search engine proves me wrong and fills in the void of Ask.com. So far it does not appear to be happening, but there is always hope....:-)

Entireweb Launches New Large Scale Search Engine

Just in case you care - Entireweb is launching it's new (updated) search engine tomorrow (countdown timer available on their website at www.entireweb.com).

Entireweb at a glance (from the website):

Entireweb's goal is to be a leading supplier of search technology solutions. The international Web search engine www.entireweb.com is not only a highly popular general purpose search engine used by millions of people around the world - it is also a showcase of our search technology and our expertise in the field of ultra-high-performance information retrieval from huge unstructured data sources.

Entireweb currently handles over 100 million searches every month, and is a trusted partner of internationally acclaimed meta search engines such as Mamma and IxQuick, who rely on Entireweb to provide world-class search results.

The new search engine promises to be much more robust with a deeper index in order to better compete against Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. Recent announcements from their blog highlight that the new engine will pull real-time data from OneRiot and image data from picsearch. Ads will be pulled from their SpeedyAds program and their is a new mobile interface available.

You can check it all out at the links below:
Entireweb Search Engine homepage
Entireweb Search Engine updates (via blog)
Add URL for FREE to Entireweb

How to Submit Your Site to Ask.com

While Ask.com is a distant fourth in the top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and then Ask.com - AOL is not included as it uses Google's index even though it has about the same marketshare as Ask.com) it can provide traffic and is an important part of any SEO effort.

Ask.com does not allow URL submissions as most other search engines do, instead the ONLY way to proactively submit your site to Ask.com is via an XML sitemap ping. This ping is VERY EASY and takes no time at all. Here is all you have to do.

Use the URL listed below and replace, 'www.MYSITE.com' with you URL and make sure you have an XML sitemap at this location - www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml. It is that easy.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml

If you do not have an XML sitemap you can create a free one online here:



Link - XML-Sitemaps.com