The announcement Thursday that IAC/InterActiveCorp [IACI] unit Ask.com will buy Lexico Publishing Group LLC was chock full of data about its target's strong and growing reach. Lexico, which owns the very popular Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com domain names, has a growth rate that is three times that of the global search market, Ask.com said, and will make Ask.com the ninth-largest Web property in the world, ahead of even Facebook Inc.

But there were a few problems with this announcement, including some of the data that Ask.com left out, namely its less impressive ranking in the market -- search -- that it is supposedly serving. As this story and others that were underwhelmed by the Lexico purchase stress, Ask.com holds a fifth-place ranking in search, behind not only Google Inc. [GOOG], Yahoo! Inc. [YHOO] and Microsoft Corp. [MSFT] but also Time Warner Inc.'s [TWX] AOL.

And the company appears to have a confused strategy -- or at least a confusing way of articulating its strategy -- for catching up. News of the Lexico purchase follows its move just two months ago to back away from efforts to take on Google and instead develop a niche of answering women's questions on such topics as recipes and children's homework.

Which begs the question: Do women consult dictionaries and thesauruses more than men? Or is Ask.com behaving like the fifth-place player it is, with every right to throw a lot of different things against the proverbial wall to see what will stick? Some of the latest comments from Ask.com CEO Jim Safka suggest the later. As Forbes notes, Safka said that Ask.com had "erroneously communicated" in March that it was focused on becoming a site for women.

None of this should take away from the Lexico purchase, which, judging by the popularity of the domain names alone, appears to be a strong one. It's just hard to say how much of a difference it will make for a company that so many in the field have already written off. - Andrea Orr

See May 15 announcement on Lexico purchase from Ask.com
See May 15 story on Ask.com from Forbes.com
See March 5 story on Ask.com from MSNBC.com
See March 5 post on Ask.com from SearchEngineLand.com