Says Ask spokesperson Nicholas Graham, "Health and reference are already two of our strongest verticals. It makes sense for Ask to team up with Komen and increase awareness amongst our 50 million monthly visitors."

According to the American Cancer Society, there are about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States and women have a 1 in 8 chance of developing invasive breast cancer. While there are a number of breast cancer-related corporate partnerships, only a few are fully embraced by health advocates. In recent years, environmental health organizations have formed the Think Before You Pink campaign as a backlash movement against companies that work on pink ribbon campaigns but manufacture products linked to the disease. Because Ask specializes in delivering information to its consumers, a public information campaign on breast cancer seems like a great fit.

Says Graham, "When you engage a community of users, the service becomes more robust. It makes a positve difference in the online and offline world." To change your skins and support Komen for the Cure visit the Ask Skins gallery.

Unfortunately, despite these innovations, people stuck with Google. It seems that googling has more to do with habit than anything else these days - being innovative doesn't necessarily translate into users when it comes to search.

That's why back in March of this year, Ask.com had to cut 8% of their staff (about 40 jobs) and began the process of restructuring their company. At the time, the word was that Ask.com would return their focus to their core audience of middle-American predominantly female users. Soon after, Ask.com's spokesperson, Nicholas Graham came out to say that information was just "plain wrong." The truth was somewhere in the middle - yes, Ask.com would be trying to focus on what their (mostly female) audience needed, but they weren't by any means turning into a women's site. "We know that a sizable group of our core user base is women, and we know they come to us for a certain kind of search: to get answers, often in areas of reference, health and entertainment," said Graham.

Those answers are exactly what Ask.com is trying to focus on now. According to a Search Engine Watch article, Ask's internal research showed that searchers looking for answers came to Ask.com three times more often than they went to other search sites, so Ask.com's plan to focus on offering easy answers makes sense.

Ask.com's Progress

Here we are, nearly 5 months later, wondering how Ask.com's big plan is coming along thus far. As it turns out, the company seems to be pretty much on track.

To return their focus to providing just answers, Ask had to dump some other initiatives that weren't paying off. Only last week, for example, we heard the news that Ask.com had decided to forgo their own mapping service and partner up with Microsoft instead. (No more walking directions!) Using the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform saves Ask.com money on both the infrastructure as well as letting them save on the cost of the frequent imagery updates and photo acquisitions required to maintain a competitive mapping service.

To become more visible, Ask.com has formed another partnership, this time, with Opera. Yesterday, it was reported that Ask has partnered up with the small-but-growing web browser to be included in the search bar as one of the drop-down choices for search engines.

But of course the big news came on Thursday, when it was announced that Ask.com had completed their acquisition of the Lexico Publishing Group, which owned Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com - a deal that is said to increase their unique monthly users by 11% to 145 million.

All these recent moves speak to Ask.com's decision to return to their core focus: answers. Instead of wasting money trying to be everything to everybody, they've outsourced the expensive of running a mapping portal and have acquired a company whose sites can help provide those short-and-sweet answers to some of the most common search queries. The only question that remains is whether these changes will be enough to give Ask.com a large enough piece of the search pie to keep their company sustainable.

At this time last year Google was at 64% and MSN was at 9%. Momentum remains with Google, but is that momentum inevitable? Could things change? We've written about three ways that it could.

Some have argued that Google's approach to search is outdated and slow to change. Apparently it's working just fine for them today, but there's a world of opportunities for other innovators to come up with a better search experience. We wrote about this situation in our recent post titled "How Vulnerable is Google in Search?"

Hitwise tracks 46 other search engines as well, which added up for a combined 1.7% of searches last month. 46 alternative search engines is like a week's work for our network blog AltSearchEgines, check it out if you'd like to learn about the rest of the industry, including some that may become the challengers of the future.

Semantic Web

Yahoo! is #2 today, but is taking the lead in support for standards based microformats and semantic web indexing. Yahoo! announced that it would index semantic markup three weeks ago. Since semantic markup could enable improvements in search quality by orders of magnitude, this could be a turning point for Google and Yahoo!

As we explained when that announcement was made:

Today, a web service might work very hard to scour the internet to discover all the book reviews written on various sites, by friends of mine, who live in Europe. That would be so hard that no one would probably try it. The suite of technologies Yahoo! is moving to support will make such searches trivial. Once publishers start including things like hReview, FOAF and geoRSS in their content then Yahoo!, and other sites leveraging Yahoo! search results, will be able to ask easily what it is we want to do with those book reviews. Say hello to a new level of innovation.

We'd like to get an update on the Yahoo! semantic indexing announcement, though, and presumably this is the kind of thing that Google will do soon as well.

Privacy Backlash

As Google grows continually stronger and more knowledgeable, the importance of the social contract between the company and its customers becomes increasingly more important. Google has not been as good as it needs to be about taking clear steps to guarantee security and prevent misuse of user data - including its own misuse of that data!

We wrote in February about how Microsoft's new levels of engagement with oppenness and data portability could offer an avenue to challenge Google, but few of our readers agreed in comments. You know what they say, though - if your mouth gets washed out with soap, you may be saying something important!

It may not be Microsoft that challenges Google, but it certainly seems possible that users will draw the line somewhere and look to limit Google's omniscience.

Perhaps not, though. Perhaps Google's search dominance will continue to grow and grow, month over month, year over year. Someday, if you want to know about your genetic propensity for a particular disease, you'll just as the Google. If you want to know what your kids are doing at home while you're away, you'll just ask the Google. Certainly today when we want to know what's on the web, a clear majority of us just ask the Google.