A handful of publications have indicated that Microsoft paid an estimated $70 million for the company, according to a report from TechCrunch Europe.

VideoSurf specializes in video search technology that scans several video related sites for results, such as DailyMotion, YouTube, Metacafe, Hulu and others. The site’s results focus on specific episodes of web shows, notable individuals and more. Admittedly, I haven’t used the site much, but I have noticed that it takes great care in separating viral/user-generated videos from the production quality videos (e.g. things from College Humor, Hulu, etc.).

It’s likely that Microsoft purchased the company with the intent of strengthening video search in its Bing search engine.

Previously, VideoSurf raised $28 million from several notable investors, including former Vice President Al Gore, Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as well as funding from Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Founded in 2006, the San Mateo, California-based startup has 35 employees.

The talks are said to still be in the early stages, and no serious offers have been made, but the play would be for Yahoo’s “core business.” The Wall Street Journal’s source said that a formal proposal hasn’t been assembled, and it’s possible Google could end up not even perusing a bid.

Any deal between the two companies would undoubtedly draw the attention of antitrust regulators, and Google is already in the hot-seat. In September, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt testified at a Senate Judiciary antitrust hearing. The committee is concerned that Google’s dominance of the search market gives it an unfair advantage when promoting its own businesses.

Google is just the latest big name to be tied to a possible Yahoo acquisition. Rumors of Yahoo putting itself up for sale have been circulating wildly since it fired Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz in September. Microsoft, Aol and Chinese company Alibaba have all expressed interest in buying all or part of the company. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang considered making a deal with private equity firms to buy up the company and take it private.

The struggling company is currently being led by interim CEO Tim Morse.

Duck Duck Go, which has a tiny percentage of the search engine market share in comparison to Google, doesn’t primarily base its results on algorithms. It also differs from other big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by not tracking its visitors the way that Google does.

Since launching in 2008, Weinberg has resisted the urge to take on outside investment until there was a compelling reason to do so.

“So why now? At the end of last year I noticed that the search engine started to really click with a greater percentage of people in a way that it hadn’t before,” Weinberg said, noting the company’s  zero-click info policy, privacy policy and goodies (a page of useful unit conversion and math tools).

Weinberg says the startup plans to use the money to hire new employees and expand its infrastructure.

Despite Duck Duck Go’s tiny market share of the overall search engine market, Union Square Venture’s Brad Burnham has a positive outlook for the startup. In a blog post about the investment deal, he writes:

“Our confidence in Gabriel and DuckDuckGo is informed by having watched the decline of Microsoft’s hegemony in the 90′s. Two things happened that fundamentally changed the game: a shift in venue and a shift in business model. The venue moved from the desktop to the web and the business model shifted from packaged software to open source. It turned out that the way to compete with Microsoft was to not to compete, at least not directly. The way to compete with Microsoft was to change the basis of competition. We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it.”

The Paoli, Penn.-based startup will add Burnham to its board of directors. The new funding round also includes investments from Scott Banister, Jim Young, Jeff Miller, Joshua Schachter, Kal Vapuri, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg.

Wine can be intimidating and often pushes people away just for the fear of looking stupid. (I know, it’s hard to believe anyone would feel insecure with a bunch of people slurping, swishing and spitting around them, but hey, this is the wine-snob norm.) TasteJive aims to open that culture up by referencing wine in a less sophisticated and more understandable way.

TasteJive relates wine to things you already know such as pop culture references, places, music, film, and more.

For instance, it might describe a wine this way: “With curves in all the right places and legs that just don’t quit, this wine will stop you in your tracks like a half-naked supermodel.” The accompanying photo of a half-naked supermodel will probably also stop you in your tracks, even if you can’t read the copy.

Or, it might rate a wine as “Overrated, and with a checkered past, like Kim Kardashian,” with a photo of Ms. Kardashian.

The wine search engine learns from your preferences, too. The more you use it, the more it detects what kinds of wine you like. TasteJive groups lovers of the same wine together and integrates with Facebook to give better, individualized recommendations based on what your friends like. The app is available on the web as well as on the iPhone.

“TasteJive enables its users to express themselves through short, clever wine recommendations,” said Paulo Lerner, chief executive and co-founder of TasteJive. “We’ve been having a lot of fun, both with the content and the evolution of TasteJive.”

Perhaps fun is the point. According to studies by WineBusiness.com, Portraits USA, and VinTank, wine is a $30 billion a year industry in the United States with more than 80 million people drinking wine in the U.S. each year. Of those 80 million, only 16 percent can be considered connoisseurs or enthusiasts. The rest of these people have no clue how to store red wine, don’t care about aerating it, probably drink Gallo from a refrigerated box, and need a little more entertainment in their lubrication education.

There are a ton of competitors out there who may not have the fun factor, but do have a deep wealth of insight into the wine industry. These include Wine.com, Snooth, Wine 2.0, HelloVino and more who may not have the most fun with their recommendations, but do appeal to a crowd who wants to learn more. These competitors also play the sophistication card, which may speak to the culturally refined side of wine. TasteJive is not afraid to take a more lowbrow, and they hope accessible, route.

TasteJive is a product of Kleintech, which was founded in 2009. There are six employees head quartered in San Francisco working on TasteJive, with a Brazil office and outsourced engineers in Russia. The company has raised a $1 million seed round from private Brazilian angel investors.

TasteJive is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective. There’s still plenty to see at DEMO, and VentureBeat readers can get a special discount on registration for the remainder of the show at demo.com/VBDay.

On August 15, 2011, CCTV aired a half-hour program exposing Baidu’s practice of ranking search results based on the amount paid to Baidu for a priority listing, instead of based on the relevance to the search terms used.

Undercover CCTV reporters also demonstrated how easily a fictitious company selling unlicensed weight-loss products could buy its way to the top of Baidu’s search results, all with the assistance of Baidu’s authorized sales and marketing agents.

This was not the first time that CCTV attacked Baidu for ethical lapses. In November 2008, the state-owned television network aired several news reports that highlighted Baidu’s practice of auctioning off top search results to the highest bidder, and of punishing companies that didn’t purchase priority placements buy removing links to their website from search results. The programs also showed that Baidu sold priority placement for certain key medical terms to fake hospitals and unlicensed medicine suppliers.

Even though nearly three years had elapsed between the programs, and Baidu had launched Phoenix Nest, a new online marketing system designed to improve relevance in paid search, the recent CCTV show explained that Baidu is still following the same old paid search business practices. It still allows unlicensed companies to buy their way to the top of the search results for key terms, CCTV claimed.

The program closed with an overt call for regulation, stating that it was clear Baidu was incapable of regulating itself.

Baidu’s practice of auctioning-off top search placements stands in sharp contrast to the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) approach. As the selection quoted below from the founders’ letter in Google’s initial public offering prospectus states, Google decided long ago that their search results would be as good as they could make them.

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.

Commentators have pointed out the many possible motives that might lie behind CCTV’s reports on Baidu, ranging from the political, to the commercial, to journalists actually doing their job.

Whatever the motives, rumors do suggest that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology may issue new online search regulations, including restrictions that would affect Baidu’s paid search rankings.

Deng Hongmin, Deputy Director of the Internet Safety Bureau at the Ministry of Public Security, confirmed during another Baidu-focused CCTV program aired on August 18, 2011, that several departments are currently revising relevant internet regulations. If those new rules are written, what might they look like?

One obvious regulatory solution to the Baidu paid search problem, as pointed out in several of CCTV’s programs, is to categorize the service as a form of advertising subject to China’s existing advertising regulatory regime. As risk factor number eleven in Baidu’s most recent annual report points out, paying for priority search placement is not currently classified as advertising under Chinese law, and thus Baidu (as the provider of the service) is not currently required to ensure that the content is fair and accurate or otherwise in compliance with applicable law.

For the advertising regulatory solution to work, however, paid search results and organic search results need to be differentiated. Otherwise Baidu might be placed in the impossible position of being held responsible for the content of every webpage that appears in its search results.

And that brings us to an interesting potential resolution: China’s regulators might force Baidu to segregate paid search advertising from organic search results, just like Google has been doing for years.

But how would the regulators determine if Baidu is complying with the new rules? Google faced a similar dilemma when it first entered the Chinese market and needed to learn how to censor its search results in order to comply with Chinese law. Since regulators wouldn’t tell them what information needed to be blocked, as described in Google’s February 2006 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on International Relations, Google analyzed searches that originated inside China’s “Great Firewall.” It then censored, from its own search results, any materials that China’s regulators themselves blocked.

Now those same regulators could consider reversing this process, by using Google’s Chinese language service to see what organic search results look like and comparing those with Baidu’s results to see if advertising links are clearly identified.

In 2010, Google ended its own challenging relationship with China’s internet regulators when it decided to stop censoring its search results to comply with Chinese law, and made a noisy exit from China’s search market.

Given this antagonistic history, an outcome where China’s regulators force Baidu to be more like Google, and perhaps used Google’s services to test Baidu’s compliance, would be an ironic twist worthy of a novelist.

Greg Pilarowski is the founder of a boutique international law firm focused upon the internet and digital media industries in China.

Photo: Julien Gong Min/Flickr.com

Google Dorks have been around for a while, as the name for an attack where hackers scan web sites, using commonly used links within company networks, to see if there are any unsecure links that can be used to break into a company’s web site. A report being released today by Imperva warns that the combination of the highly automated botnets and the Google Dorks are a new vector for hackers to break into companies on a massive scale.

Hackers sometimes manually scan sites for such stray links, but that’s like looking for a needle in the haystack. They have now figured out how to automate their scanning. They do so by getting botnets, or farms of compromised computers that have been hijacked without the owners’ knowledge. These botnets are used to automatically search through a series of links that may be related to a company’s web site. They use the botnets and Google Dorks to uncover weaknesses, and then they launch conventional hacking attacks against them. The result of these attacks can be contaminated web sites, data theft, data modification, or compromised company servers.

The hackers can efficiently use popular search engines as an attack platform to retrieve sensitive data. Botnets automate the process and can evade anti-automation detection techniques commonly deployed by the search engine providers. By using bots that are distributed throughout the world, the hackers fool the search engines into thinking that the searching is being done by real human individuals, not a herd of bots controlled by a hacker.

“This is what the hackers do to conduct cyber reconnaissance,” said Rob Rachwald, a senior security strategist at security firm Imperva, in an interview. “This used to be a manual process, but now it’s automated.”

With the automation, attackers can get a filtered list of potentially vulnerable web sites in a very short time. Mining search results can expose neglected sensitive files and folders, and unearth network logs and unprotected network-attached devices.

With botnets, the hackers can run 80,000 queries in a day, eluding detection and efficiently fishing for attack targets. Imperva’s Application Defense Center observed a particular botnet in action during the May-June time frame and witnessed its use against a well-known search engine provider. By tracking this botnet, Imperva found how attackers lay the groundwork to simplify and automate the next stages in an attack campaign against web apps.

“We found out because we were observing,” Rachwald said.

Today, search engines detect automated search routines by detecting the searcher’s internet protocol, or IP, address. If the same address is used over and over again for slightly different searches, the search engines block it. But botnets consist of computers scattered around the world, all using different IP addresses. Hackers can hide their identities behind these botnets, which are available on the underground for rental.

The botnets can be used with a distributed search tool to find distinguishable resource names and specific error messages that say more than they should. Dorks are often exchanged between hackers in forums. Some of the lists of Dorks are posted on various web sites. Dorks and exploits go hand in hand.

In the attack that Imperva observed, the attackers used dorks that match vulnerable web applications and search operators that were tailored to a specific search engine. For each unique search query, the botnet examined hundreds of returned results. Full told, the number of queries topped 550,000 queries, including one day with 81,000 queries — all via  single botnet.

The attackers targeted e-commerce sites and content management systems. The more success they had, the more the attackers refined their search terms. Imperva saw 4,719 different variations of dorks used in the attacks.

Fortunately, there are some solutions that Google, Bing and Yahoo can use to protect against these attacks. Search engines are in a unique position to identify botnets that abuse their services and can thus find out more about the attackers. The search engines can identify unusual queries such as those that contain terms from publicly available Dork databases, or queries that look for sensitive files. By doing so, search engines can come up with more blacklisted IP addresses. Google can force some searchers to fill out a CAPTCHA form, (where you look at handwritten characters and type the word that you see), to prove they are human searchers.

Rachwald said that web site creators should attack themselves using common Dork search terms and find out if they are vulnerable. They should also mask their links so that they are harder to guess.Web application firewalls should be able to detect and block attempts at finding application vulnerabilities. The web sites can also use reputation controls to block attacks coming from known malicious sources.

The company making it possible is Reputation.com, an online privacy company that just picked up a $41 million round led by August Capital.

However, the details of the product, still under development, are unclear.

Michael Fertik says it’s designed to put consumers in control of their own data.  “It’s like a vault where they can put data and get paid for it themselves,” he explained in an interview with VentureBeat. Advertising is one of the biggest business models behind the Web, and consumers should be able to leverage that, according to Fertik. One way is to seek payment when such data is sought for by advertisers.

While the idea of having control over my data enough to monetize it is tempting, I think I’d want to know more about the back-end processes Reputation.com engages in. Here the details are frustratingly vague — especially for such a sensitive proposition.

After the interview, I was left with no details about how the company farms my data from the web, and slightly creeped out.

Indeed, much about Reputation.com’s existing product is unclear. The company’s main offerings defends customers against negative mentions in search results. It monitors the internet for relevant content about their customers,  and somehow — it won’t quite say how —
Reputation.com says it makes negative posts appear lower down in search engine rankings. (See image for an example of before and after).

But here too, Reputation.com doesn’t explain how. Fertik, answered only: “There’s a lot of math involved.” The company even says it can remove personal information entirely. Again, no details. (In years past, the company contacted sites directly to encourage them to remove undesirable content. Fertik explained that Reptation.com no longer makes these requests.)

Finally, when we asked the company’s PR person for more information about how personal information is removed from the web, they refused to divulge anything. I bet there was a lot of math involved.

To be fair, some of this information is what makes Reputation.com successful, it’s the secret sauce. The PR person explained, “This expertise is something we hold close; it is one of the skills that makes us most valuable.”

Though, the secret sauce is to remain hidden, there’s something to be said for allowing search engines to provide results naturally and not hide negative commentary. VentureBeat asked whether Fertik believed “controlling” search engine rankings might skew the truth a bit, rendering an inaccurate portrayal of the searched subject. To believe you are getting an accurate portrayal in the first place, he said, you have to believe that “Google is pristine on its own, you have to believe that Google is perfect,” implying accurate portrayals are unrealistic:  “Google is just a machine, it’s not God, it’s a machine.”

Fertik used the example of an ex-boyfriend posting slanderous comments, which you’d naturally like to suppress in search rankings for your professional profile.

That is undeniably desirable, but the flip side is the mother who needs to know if her nanny is actually trustworthy or the consumer who wants to know how reliable their dry cleaner is. What’s to prevent shady characters from using Reputation.com to slant their online profiles toward the positive? The company says it it has clear policies about this, saying it doesn’t serve criminals. But I’m not talking about criminals per se, I’m talking about all that gray in between.

Reptuation.com was founded in 2006 and has 150 employees. Funding to date is around $66 million from August Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Floodgate Fund.

Instant Pages uses web rendering to load webpages from search results 3 to 5 times faster for the average person, according to Google’s Amit Singhal, who reaffirmed the company’s commitment to a faster search experience during the demo.

Singhal explained that the average webpage takes about 5 seconds to load, making the total search experience roughly 30 seconds long, according to the “Query Timeline” infograph used in the demo. That amount of time will probably seem arbitrary for anyone not in charge of improving the world’s most successful web search engine.

The company first made an effort to speed up the search experience with Instant Search, which begins working immediately as a user starts entering words into the search bar (without having to press enter or the “search” button). Instant Pages seeks to do the same with the webpages people are navigating to.

The Instant Pages feature will be available on Google Chrome Beta later this week and is currently available on the developer version of Google’s Chrome browser. Since the code is open-source, Google hopes other browsers will adopt the pre-rendering functionality as a standard.

Google also announced that Instant search functionality is coming for images as well as the ability to search via voice or image from a desktop.

Check out Google’s official demo video for Instant Pages below.

Search engines rely on schemas, or HTML tags, to improve results and make them more accurate. When webmasters set out to optimize their sites for SEO, they can use these markups to help push their sites to the top of results.

A lengthy note on schema.org gives a little more background and explains why finding common ground with website markup is so important:

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

This isn’t the first time the biggest players in search have collaborated on a project of this nature. In 2006, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft came together to create sitemaps.org, which helped standardize Sitemap protocol.

Such a feature would be a boon to developers, since they can manage messaging for theirs apps in one location instead of having to visit each app store one at a time. Additionally, Quixey’s App Developer accounts will allow developers to see what users are saying about their apps in one location. The company says it has received “extremely positive feedback” from developers who’ve been testing out the accounts.

Quixey’s search technology will also scrape the web to find all available versions of apps, which will remind developers of the platforms they haven’t yet hit, and will offer consumers an easy way to see which platforms their favorite apps support.

Quixey has built from scratch an app search engine that responds to user needs. For example, a query of “find cheap gas” will bring up apps that will help with just that. Founders Tomer Kagan and Liron Shapira call this “functional search” and describe it as “a new type of search specifically for the app world.”

The company will compete directly with Chomp, which has been attacking the app discovery problem for some time now — first with app recommendations, and now with a search engine focus. Appolicious has also been in the app search game for some time now.

Mountain View, Calif.,-based Quixey has raised $400,000 in seed funding from investors including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavours and Archimedes Ventures. The company plans to launch at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City on May 23 to May 25.

While many Twitter users are retweeting without complaint, others are pointing out that this campaign seems like a crass marketing opportunity for Bing.

Comedian Michael Ian Black, who has nearly 1.6 million Twitter followers, graphically responded to the campaign with this tweet: “Hey @bing, stop using a tragedy as a fucking marketing opportunity.” Searching for “@Bing” on Twitter at the time of this post reveals plenty of other users who aren’t taking too kindly to Microsoft’s campaign.

This backlash shows us that as useful as social media is for inspiring activism, it must be carefully deployed so as not to seem like a craven publicity stunt. Most recently, we saw a similar backlash to Kenneth Cole’s tweet about Cairo amid Egypt’s recent protests, in which the fashion label plugged its spring collection.

I can’t imagine how Microsoft didn’t see this coming. It would have received plenty of good will by simply donating $100,000 to help out quake victims. This campaign, on the other hand, seems like a forced attempt to get people talking about Bing, and ultimately to get it trending on Twitter. Now people are indeed talking about Bing, but Microsoft likely won’t appreciate what they’re saying.

Update: the Bing folks have now apologized and will donate the full $100,000 amount to help the quake victims.

Tweet image via Ethan Maffey

The company says this is the first time Bing has ever surpassed Yahoo, but that’s only according to StatCounter data. In September 2010, the research company Nielsen found that Bing ousted Yahoo as the second place search engine worldwide.

It’s not unusual for web analytics companies to have differing data, but it’s definitely worth taking note when their disparate data ultimately reaches the same conclusion. Now Bing is clearly even more of a threat to Yahoo.

Statcounter found that Bing accounted for 4.37 percent of searches globally, while Yahoo only held 3.93 percent. Their single digit traffic also goes to show just how powerful Google is with its 89.94 percent of the market. In the US, Yahoo still holds a slight lead over Bing at 9.74 percent versus 9.03 percent. Earlier this month, Hitwise noted that Bing’s usage saw a significant bump in January — going so far as to take search share from Google in the US.

Bing also powers Yahoo’s search in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico, so Yahoo’s success in those markets is still helping out Microsoft. Bing will completely replace Yahoo’s search back-end globally in 2012. Yahoo announced in July of 2009 that it would be giving up on its own search technology and teaming up with Microsoft to take on Google.

Rosenblatt had to endure a lot of criticism in silence due to the quiet period before Demand Media’s IPO and its first earnings report. Now, however, he said it’s time to respond. First, he acknowledged that Demand Media’s articles often address somewhat arcane topics, but he said that doesn’t mean they aren’t serving a real need for readers.

As examples, Rosenblatt offered two articles that have run on Demand Media sites. First, the company estimated that nearly 100,000 people search for “how to make a paper lantern,” and that 20,000 of them ended up reading the Demand Media article on that topic.

“I don’t have a use for that article, but lots of people do,” Rosenblatt said.

And with the snowy weather, the company estimated than 12,000 people recently searched for how to rake their roof, with thousands of them reading Demand’s article on that topic.

The second big criticism is about Demand Media’s quality. But Rosenblatt argued that the company’s editorial team has a strong quality control process in place, outlined on a new “Content Matters” website. In fact, he said the company “matches or exceeds traditional media companies.”

During the analyst question session, Rosenblatt also talked about Google’s new efforts to cut down on spammy content in its search results. That won’t hurt Demand Media’s traffic, he said — in fact, reducing duplicate or bad content in results actually helps the company’s traffic.

Rosenblatt was thinking about these criticisms earlier in the call when he talked about Demand Media’s flagship site eHow, where he said direct traffic is growing faster than search engine traffic. The implication: Demand Media isn’t entirely beholden to Google.

I don’t think that a few sound bites and a corporate website are going change Demand Media’s image, but hey, at least the company is making its case.

As for those earnings, Demand Media reported $73.6 million in revenue and $1 million in net income, beating its earlier estimates.

[image via Flickr/B Garrett]

The bigger news, and perhaps the underlying reason for the rise: Microsoft’s Bing might be the better search engine. Hitwise says that Google’s “success rate” is just 65 percent, compared with an 82 percent score for Bing. The success rate is the percentage of times users click on links yielded by searches.

Google is still by far the most popular search engine, with 68 percent of the market. Hitwise measures 70 other search engines, which together share 4.6 percent of the market.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan writes that “Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo [to run Bing results in Yahoo searches] appears to be paying off.” In one sense, that’s true: Without Yahoo, Bing’s market share would be just 12.8 percent. But searches on Yahoo fell in January, from 15.2 percent of the total to 14.6 percent, while searches at Bing.com rose by 21 percent.

I fully agree with Dignan, though, when he says that Bing is increasingly looking like a threat to Google.

Ask.com might possess some value if it were spun off into a standalone company outside of IAC, but it hasn’t gained any significant ground in the search engine market since it was acquired five years ago, Diller said.

“I don’t think anybody ascribes any meaningful value to Ask.com when compared to a site like Vimeo which has huge potential,” he said. Vimeo is an online-video site within IAC’s portfolio.

The admission calls into question Diller’s skills as a media dealmaker. Historically, he has made his name buying and selling properties, everything from cable channels to e-commerce sites. Over time, his company has repeatedly changed its name and focus. But after spinning off many of its businesses in 2007, a smaller IAC has concentrated on online media and advertising properties.

Ask.com still accounts for 3.8 percent of all searches on the Internet, according to data from comScore — but that’s compared to Google’s colossal 65 percent market share and Yahoo’s 17 percent market share. Data from comScore several years ago also suggests Ask.com has been losing momentum. It powered 4.5 percent of all searches on the Internet in August 2007.

“We didn’t gain share, and I don’t think we’re going to gain share,” Diller said. “We’ve held it, which is a bit of a miracle, but that’s not what we intended when we picked it up five years ago.”

The Oakland, Calif.-based company was founded in 1996 and was a public company between 1999 and 2005, when IAC acquired the search engine. Ask.com was formerly AskJeeves.com before it decided to throw out the company’s mascot, a friendly looking butler named Jeeves, in 2006 and rebrand the website.

Largely as a result of IAC’s spinoffs, Diller is on the board of directors of five companies including IAC. He serves as the chairman of travel site Expedia, formerly owned by IAC. He announced today that he will resign as the chairman of live event hosting company Live Nation’s board of directors by the end of the year, which merged with former IAC property Ticketmaster earlier this year.

Update: Diller has released a statement in response to the article, which an IAC spokesperson sent to VentureBeat via email.

“I did not say that Ask has no value inside of IAC, period. In response to a specific question, I said that many of our assets are not ‘valued’ in the stock, and Ask is one of them…I was asked specifically if Ask would be better off with us or another company or standing alone. In the context of that question, I said that since it wasn’t valued in IAC –  like so many of our businesses, because we have so many –  that it would only be ‘valued’ stand alone.”

AOL still possesses a 2.3 percent market share of the search market, which isn’t negligible, though it’s dwarfed by Google’s Boeing-sized 66 percent market share, according to ComScore. Yahoo checks in next at 17 percent, with Microsoft’s Bing a seemingly distant 11 percent despite its efforts to unseat the de facto overlord of search.

But this could be a sign that Google feels threatened by Bing and is willing to pay out to secure its dominance in the search engine market. Yahoo and Microsoft recently inked a 10-year partnership deal that would power Yahoo back-end search with Bing.

AOL will receive a portion of the revenue from text-based searches and some of AOL’s video content will be featured on YouTube as part of the agreement.

At AOL’s zenith as a dial-up Internet provider, the company boasted nearly 30 million users according to a BusinessWeek report, but with the advent of broadband its star has begun to wane. According to the company’s most recent 10-Q filing, it had 4.4 million subscribers in June 2010, down from 5.8 million a year earlier. Former Googler Tim Armstrong is currently leading an effort to revive the company as its CEO.

While it’s true that Bing’s cashback feature failed to hit it off with the masses, it became wildly popular among deal-seeking web shoppers who frequented sites like Slickdeals.net. Unfortunately for those shoppers, that same over-enthusiastic adoption of the service likely led to its demise. Deal sites would heavily promote deals that used Bing cashback, and many shoppers figured out loopholes to receive cashback from purchases at eBay, B&H, and other online stores.

It was clear that Bing cashback would never last after deal hunters caught wind of its potential. When the cashback feature was announced, it was promoted as an innovative way to drive sales to retailers. Instead, the deal hunters’ abuse of the feature led to sales that were going to be made anyway, according to consultant Ben Metcalfe. There was little payoff for Bing as well — the deal seekers didn’t migrate to the search engine, and they didn’t use Bing’s shopping section for purchases without the cashback offer.

For the few that took advantage of Bing cashback, Microsoft won’t be leaving them high and dry. Users will have a year to claim their cashback funds, and Microsoft will also make customer support available for a year as well.

Microsoft also mentioned that it’s currently thinking of other ways to offer deals through Bing. We can expect to hear about those new initiatives later this summer.

The company continues its push to develop a true decision engine, one that tries to determine the searchers request and give responding results, rather than the traditional Google like search results. Bing will now host some appealing upgrades, including Quick Tabs, real-time search, and an integrated map with Foursquare.

To help the user find the most relevant information, Quick Tabs work to organize and arrange the most robust information upfront. A search on Boston, for example, provides upfront information on weather, attractions and flight deals (see image below). Recently signed deals with Twitter and Facebook, help to put more real-time information within search results. And, finally, a map integrated with Foursquare is available that when activated shows local check-in locations and their “mayors” — users who are most active at any one location.

Among the major search engines, Microsoft’s Bing continues to nibble its way up the charts according to recent research by comScore. The question that remains is will these new features continue to help Bing gain market share by pulling in users from other engines, or will they just be a few nice bells and whistles for current users.

Hundreds of millions of people are surfing at any given time. We in the U.S. (and other English speaking countries) have a tendency to think everyone speaks our language.

While many do, that’s not as big an advantage as it seems. Global consumers are over five times more likely to buy from a website with content in their native language.

The foreign language Internet – meaning all web content not in English – is an enormous opportunity for companies to increase revenue, but one that most ignore. In doing so, they’re not only throwing away money, they’re unnecessarily increasing their competition.

Launching a web page in English instantly pits you against billions of other pages on the search engines. Launching a page in another language can make it much easier to achieve prominence.

At Lingo24, we launched a Danish micro-site at a cost of under £100/$160 at the beginning of last year. By September, sales had reached a level that allowed us to take on a full-time account manager – and the Danish market has become a significant and growing slice of our business. All totaled, international revenue now accounts for 64 percent of our business.

Obviously, you don’t want to ignore the domestic market, but your company’s entry into an underserved territory could attract the eyes of industry watchers in that country. That can mean media attention alone, improved search engine positions and customers. Seek out relevant media in the markets you target.

Combined, foreign language markets can be worth more than your domestic market. Need proof? Look at Google. The dominant search engine in all but a handful of countries, Google derives 52 percent of its revenue from the foreign language Internet.

Putting together a foreign language Internet site may sound daunting, so here are a few things to keep in mind as you begin planning your strategy.

Develop your understanding of the market. If you have customers abroad, or domestic clients with links abroad, ask them whether they think your offering might be attractive internationally. Ask for contacts that can validate your ideas and perhaps become your first customers.

Check out the competition. Google’s automatic translation tools can help you quickly determine what your competition is up to.

Evaluate the demand. Use Google and Yahoo’s tools to identify the key phrases you need to target in your foreign markets.

Have your site professionally translated. Google’s translation program is adequate for understanding content, but completely unreliable for a company website. Use a professional translation company to get the message right for your customers.

Market your site online. The principles are the same as in English. Build links through partners; use pay-per-click; and try to get mentioned on sites your potential customers frequent.

Following these steps (and repeating the process in other languages) can result in a larger, better-diversified business.

About the author: Christian Arno is founder of Lingo24, a global translation and website localization company.