Interesting interview over at C|Net.

Ask has become a bit of a dark horse in the search world, and not to be underestimated. Since the new design and relaunch, they’ve grown 7%, so while they’re currently not a big threat to the dominance of Google, Yahoo! and MSN, there’s still some useful traffic numbers, and they have an audience demographic not unlike MSN.

Interesting snippets:

“Well, one way is that we’re not a portal, and we’re not being distracted by anything beyond core search”

“Image search….but that’s the second-leading kind of search performed on a search engine. So by improving that for users we doubled the number of searches done on our site in image search in three months, and that helped us grow market share”.

“Well right now, there is an insatiable demand for clicks, for traffic from online advertising…from search advertising…at the end of the day you’re (only) going to be constricted by inventory”.