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How much of this is toolbar spam?

I'm sure toolbar spam accounts for a lot of Ask's traffic, but we shouldn't see that here.

The graph shows the relative amounts of people who use Google to search for (i.e. navigate to) Ask, NYT, and CNN.

So, if toolbar spam is involved, it's Google's toolbar.

How much sense does it make to use one search engine's traffic to gauge usage of another's? Anyone with ask.com as their home page / default is not counted.

Hmm. I just checked with quantcast, and the graphs are similar: http://www.quantcast.com/ask.com http://www.quantcast.com/nytimes.com http://www.quantcast.com/cnn.com

also it gives an estimate of 110M visitors per month. Not too shabby.

If you extend alexa timeline to the max, you see a large spike at the end of 08 that drops dramatically in January of 09 and it's relatively flat from mid 09 to now.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ask.com%2F%3F...

If you look at the "also visited" tab - all of the sites listed are arbitrage crap.

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