SES San Jose LIVE / Day 2: Jim Lanzone's Keynote

Jim's morning keynote wasn't a speech, but rather an informal Q & A with conference programmer Chris Sherman. Chris changed up his pitches a few times, and Jim took it all in stride.

Chris started out by congratulating Jim on the positive reviews Ask3D search have been receiving. Jim credited the product--and the company's culture as well--as a deft "combination of art and science."

From there, they talked market share. Jim explained that he prefers to view success on a basis of growth--particularly since the recent new-criteria ComScore results "turned 'market share' on its head." Jim said he prefers to focus on the company's growth in the market instead.

"When we're creating our products, we're not sitting around a table thinking, 'how can we beat (Google)'," he continued. "If we take care of the user, market share will take care of itself."

Coopetition at Home and Elsewhere

Chris shifted the conversation to Google, specifically the fact that Ask is Google's biggest advertising partner. Jim explained that Ask and Google have come up together, having taking the risk of choosing them over established player Overture way back when. "When our first (advertising) deal was announced with them, it was three years, 100 million dollars." This year, Ask's ad deal will be several billion dollars, "Whoever we go with."

After a bit of reminiscing about the dot-bomb times ("I came through an acquisition...the stock was 79 cents...we sold to IAC for 2.3 billion in 2005...") The conversation turned to our parent company, IAC.

Chris asked how we work with our sister companies. Jim explained that we give them less favoritism than our competitors--he cited CitySearch's paid inclusion deal with Yahoo as an example--and that in fact we work best with our fellow IAC-ites when we're utilizing their data. "that's why AskCity works so well," he continued, "We're under no (corporate) mandate to favoritize our partners...we use them when they're the best sources of data."

Privacy vs. Personalization

And of course, Chris brought up that most recent hot-button issue, data privacy and our recent announcement of Ask Eraser. "I think it's been a slow news summer, in that it got that much publicity as it did," Jim mused, suggesting that the actual amount of people who are concerned about the issue has been exaggerated. He pointed out the popularity of personal search applications, like our own MyStuff, launched back in 2004, as evidence of this. "But for the people for whom that's important, we'll have Ask Eraser."

On the subject of personalized search, Chris pointed out the similarities between eTour, Jim's old company that was acquired by Ask almost ten years ago, and social search apps like StumbleUpon. "Just because it's new to you, doesn't mean it's new," he quipped.

(Ok, this synopsis is getting as long as the actual Q & A; let's gloss a little:)

The conversation shifted back to Ask3D, which Jim called "the next generation of search," and pointed out that people are continuing to embrace non traditional search results. He also mentioned that as much as 50% of an Ask3D page contains images, video, news--everything but traditional search results. People are finding images without doing an image search, video without doing a video search, etc.--all of which means traditional reporting won't tell our whole story.

"If we were worried about market share," he said, "We certainly wouldn't have done 3D."

Ad Networks and Network Ads

They then turned to The Ask ad network, where Jim laid out a few of its advantages (e.g. 71 million users, 10% of all searches in the US).

Not wholly unrelated, Chris asked Jim how well he thought big brands are handling SEO.

Jim remarked that they're still trying to catch up. He noticed a lot of the big brands recognize this--and are snapping up a lot of the SEM firms as a reaction. "More important," he said, the major ad agencies still have a lot to learn about online, and they're going to need the expertise of everybody in this room to help them."

They covered a few other subjects, including vertical search, mobile, and the future of personalization for Ask. He finished up by giving the audience a sneak peek at the next round of Ask.com TV ads--no monkeys, dogs, swords or Katos in these!

 

Ken Grobe
Product Content Manager
Ask.com