All Things Digital

With more critics piling on to the just-say-no-to-Yahoogle bandwagon–questioning the controversial ad deal for Yahoo to outsource some of its search ads to Google–sources said some top Google execs are now hightailing it to Washington, D.C., to smooth over any regulatory feathers the company might have ruffled with its aggressive, damn-the-torpedoes approach to pushing the deal forward.

The partnership is set to start up around Oct. 13 and promises to give the much-suffering Yahoo (YHOO) a huge boost in revenues.

Google (GOOG), of course, benefits by blocking Microsoft (MSFT), which has caused the software giant to lobby against the deal like a lipstick-wearing pitbull.

Google and Microsoft have been locked in a variety of tech battles on many fronts of late, but the Yahoo front has been a particularly rough one.

Critics like Microsoft have a lot of ammo here though, especially because Yahoo and Google together will claim over 80 percent of the search market.

That has caused a big outcry to prevent the No. 1 and No. 2 players from partnering.

The latest objection, among a passel of them, came earlier this week from the World Federation of Advertisers, which has asked the European Commission to stop the partnership, even though the deal, as currently conceived, impacts only U.S. Web sites.

So to assuage the tumult, Google is glad-handing regulators, even as Yahoo announced a new group for advertisers called the Digital Advisory Council.

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BoomTown is flatly fascinated by the rather incredible memo Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer penned to his troops yesterday, with news of the reorganization of its massive Platforms and Services Division and the departure of its president, Kevin Johnson.

In the memo, in a very rare public airing of its less-clean laundry, Ballmer actually casts Microsoft’s two major rivals, Apple and Google, in a somewhat positive light, while still vowing to best them.

It is not often that Ballmer or even Microsoft Founder Bill Gates mentions either company in public. More to the point, what neither typically does is acknowledge that they do anything right.

But Ballmer did so yesterday in the memo, perhaps a sign that Microsoft (MSFT) realizes it has trouble on its hands and needs to publicly declare tough enemies to pump itself up to fight.

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BoomTown had a lovely lunch yesterday with Jim Lanzone, former CEO of Ask, the little search engine that, well, tries, at least.

Lanzone had been at the company, which is owned by Barry Diller’s InteractiveCorp (IACI), for more than a half-dozen years, before stepping down in January in a management reshuffle at the company that put Match.com CEO Jim Safka at the top of Ask.

At the time, Diller praised Lanzone copiously in a statement, but noted that “these changes are intended to strengthen and streamline the operating structure at IAC, both leading up to our intended spinoffs, and beyond.”

For those not following IAC’s tribulations of late, Diller is currently embroiled in a vitriolic fight over control of the company with one of its biggest shareholders, Liberty Media, and its voluble leader John Malone.

That’s no longer Lanzone’s problem, although he remains a consultant to Ask for a little while longer and is also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures. He told BoomTown that he is still trying to figure out what to do next, but wants to remain on the product side of the consumer Internet business.

I like Lanzone a lot, especially given the more innovative and even aggressive efforts Ask has made to gain ground and try to put a dent in Google’s market share in recent years, laudable efforts a larger player like Yahoo might have been trying as hard.

While we despised the high-concept Kato Kaelin ads (see it once again posted below the Lanzone video to see why) Ask used this summer, BoomTown does not blame Lanzone for them–paging Barry Diller! All is forgiven anyway, since they were junked.

In any case, here is a video interview with Lanzone done yesterday, in which we talked about where search was headed:

How’s this for a juicy quote?:

“I am beginning to think these people are insane. … Everything they cite is hogwash.”

That’s what is known as a classic Barry Diller, who can be relied on to come out with a good one when provoked.

In this case, the provocateur is Liberty Media’s John Malone (pictured on the right in this comic with Diller), whose company has headed to court to try to remove Diller from his job as chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

As chronicled by the always deft Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal today, the fight between the longtime partners is getting uglier still with–oh, let’s just admit it–totally confusing moves and countermoves about the fate of IAC and its subsidiaries.

Liberty has a giant stake in all of these entities and Diller, of course, has control of that stake. A recipe for mogul mud wrestling, if ever there was one.

But the fight is a serious one for a number of high-profile Web companies within IAC, which was being restructured to stop just this kind of fighting between Diller and Malone.

Just how Diller has gone about rejiggering it all, in complicated spin-offs in a way that allegedly undercuts Liberty’s control yet again, is what set the new round of tensions off.

Those sites embroiled in the fighting include: Expedia, TicketMaster, LendingTree and Ask.

As luck would have it, Diller will be interviewed onstage at the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital in late May, so there will be plenty to talk about!

The last time I interviewed him at the Monaco Media Forum last November, Diller let loose too, when he memorably scoffed at the $15 billion valuation for Facebook and Microsoft’s $240 million investment in the hot social network.

“If it was real money, it would be insane, but since it isn’t really, then why bother [worrying about it],” said Diller. “It doesn’t mean anything, it is a phantom, false valuation. Let them sell for $14 billion, $998 million, and then I’ll believe them.”

You’ve come a short way, baby–at least by the looks of the new television ad touting the recent redesign of Ask.com, the search engine that is too big to be in the other category and yet still not Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And that’s a shame.

But being No. 5–unfortunately, in this case–requires some showmanship, if that’s what you would call the bizarre commercial featuring a man who has typed in “chicks with swords” and sings repeatedly and, well, repetitively, that “I got what I was asking for.” Naturally, a bevy of scantily clad iron maidens swish their weaponry behind him in a Busby Berkeley-style cavalcade.

When I typed the same thing in, I thankfully got a lot less, although the link to a video of a “Hot Asian Female Assassin” looked promisingly awful.

All joking aside, it’s another strange chapter for the also-ran Ask, which has apparently lost its marketing mind after it killed off Jeeves the Butler a while back. This TV ad comes after the viral (and still continuing) campaign centering around the “Algorithm,” wherein billboards declared menacingly “The Algorithm was banned in China,” inexplicably “The Algorithm consistently finds Jesus,” annoyingly “The Algorithm is from New Jersey” and just plain offensively “The Unabomber hates the Algorithm.”

That’s too bad, as any new upgrade of a search engine, which Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski wrote about here, has to be a good thing. While I will leave the reviewing of the new interface of Ask (called Ask 3D) to folks like Walt, one of the things that struck me from most of the people onstage at the D5 conference last week was that everyone talked about the evolution of search and how it has to change. Hopefully, we all don’t have to wait until the mandarins of Google decide to do something about improving the search experience when it pleases them.

In any case, I think most feel that search is still in its Neanderthal stages and that some years hence we will all laugh at the pages we now find valuable and useful, somewhat like looking back now at clunky early versions of AOL or Yahoo (pictured here).

Speaking of Yahoo, instead of creating insane commercials, of course, another tack is redefining the subject. That’s what Tapan Bhat, vice president of Front Doors, Yahoo’s personalized home page, did when he spoke this week at a conference in Europe. “Search is no longer the dominant paradigm,” said Bhat. “The future of the Web is about personalization.”

We’ll see, but until then, we’ll apparently have to bring on the dancing girls (the Ask commercial below was uploaded to YouTube by TechCrunch):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.