Ask Strikes a Deal with Lycos By: Jason Hahn - Topic: Web - Date: November 2, 2006

Ask.com, the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. (according to comScore qSearch), has just taken another step towards their goal of grabbing 10% of the search market.  Currently, they stand at 5.8% of the total search market according to comScore, and 2.7% according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Yesterday, the search engine struck a deal with Web portal Lycos that will allow Ask to provide search results as well as sponsored listings.

Prior to this arrangement, Lycos relied on Microsoft's Live Search for its search results, and Google for sponsored ads.

According to Lycos, the portal is the fifth most popular portal on the Internet.  Ask Vice President for Business Development & Syndication Solutions, Andrew Moers, added that "The query volume that Lycos generates is in the same ballpark as MySpace's."

This means a big potential rise in Ask's advertising revenues.

Apparently, Lycos was especially keen on Ask's Zoom features, which offers suggestions to searchers to help to target their query better.

Bravo for Ask, who has been making relatively good progress since their re-branding in February of 2006.  The search engine will have a hard time catching up to Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in terms of search share, but at least they're on the right path.

Read more about this here and here.