Ask.com Acquires Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com for $100 million

Posted by Vaibhav

May 27, 2008

Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, the owner of Ask.com has acquired Lexico Publishing Group, the owner of prominent sites like Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com for $100 million.

The latest move reflects a new strategy by Ask.com to distinguish itself from the online search engine giant Google and other large competitors. However, the deal between IAC and Lexico remained undisclosed.

Last year, a similar attempt was made by Answers.com but the deal did not work out eventually.

Ask said that the takeover will help it ‘super-serve’ its core audience, with a hope to make more money showing ads to users looking for answers to basic queries.

The company believed that the acquisition made sense as due to their traffic and growth, there is a vast inbound interest with more than 30% searches conducted on their search engine being in the reference category.

Moreover, the acquisition does not mean that Ask will abandon its role as a general, multipurpose search engine.

As per ComScore, over half-a-billion worldwide monthly searches consist of thesaurus, dictionary, and reference queries, which is an increase by 20% from the same period last year.

According to Ask, more than 145 million unduplicated unique users will be added to Ask Network’s current traffic on a monthly basis due to the increasing visitors to the Lexico sites.

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