Ask.com, a search engine owned by IAC/InteractiveCorp, has less than five percent share of total U.S. search market.  With the acquisition of Dictionary.com and other reference sites, Ask is planning to cater to the users looking for answers to basic questions.

It looks like a legible move for Ask as it will give some boost to its revenue as well as user base considering over 20 million visitors that Dictionary.com gets per month.

RusmoreDrive product offerings include:

• Search:  More of a universal search.  It lets you search web, news, images, videos, blogs, local businesses and maps.  The local business and map search results are provided through Ask.com.
• News:  The News feature which gathers and delivers news headlines from various Black media sources, blogs as well as general market news sources.
• Job Networks:  The Job Networks on RushmoreDrive are powered by Jobster.  This feature will provide the Black community with social networking tools to help them in their job search.

I tested the web search and found the result to be very focused on the Black community.  I used “United States” and “Music” as the search terms and the result were relevant.  The ability to rate the search results is also provided but I am not sure whether those ratings are used for improving the search results or not.

Johnny Taylor, RushmoreDrive.com President and CEO, said,

We are going to be the online home for all Black people in America whether they be African American, Black Caribbean, Black Hispanic, or people of African heritage.

Finally, Black people across the country have a search engine that is shaped by the interests and usage of the Black community.  Mainstream search engines and  professional networking communities fail to easily provide information relevant to a Black audience and current search tools often do not deliver search results from Black Web sites in the first several pages of results. RushmoreDrive.com will deliver a highly relevant Web search experience for the Black community, plus two highly relevant online search activities – News Search and Jobs Search.

For public awareness and as their launch initiative, RusmoreDrive will start a forum named Road to November 4 which will offers tools and information about the 2008 Presidential Election.  Presidential candidate and Senator Hillary Clinton has agreed to participate in this forum and she will answer a question each day from a member of RushmoreDrive community between April 10 and April 17, 2008.

RushmoreDrive is gaining traction in the corporate sector as well as other organizations.  Their launch partners include the National Urban League, the National Alliance of Black School Educators, the National Association of African Americans in Human Resources, General Motors, Diageo, Coca-Cola, and Signature Wine Group.

Alfred Huger, vice president of engineering at Symantec, says:

The malicious attacks – including recent exploits of users of Google, Facebook, search engines, Mozilla and others – are designed to steal user credentials or launch bigger attacks through the victim’s social network of contacts.

The hackers are switching for their earlier favorite method, email, and now they are using reliable websites to drive traffic to sites loaded with viruses and malacious codes.  Previously, I had covered how the combination of Google Trends and Blogspot is being used to spread viruses.

So how do the hackers use these sites:

Social Networks: Hackers use the open architecture of social networks and their platform to create and deploy applications loaded with malicious codes and implant links to malicious websites.  Some of the examples are the Facebook application for users to find out who have a crush on them and the recent worm which spread on Orkut through the scraps posted on user profiles.

Search Engines: The hackers are using Google to redirect the users to sites loaded with malicious codes.  The search result links which look very relevant to the search and legitimate often redirect users to infected websites.  I have myself experienced this and even posted about how the combination of Google Trends and Google Blogger is used for spreading viruses.

Another method which is being used by the cyber criminals for phishing scams is the Google Calendar.  Jamz Yaneza, research project manager at Trend Micro, says,

Scammers are sending personalized e-mail as meeting invitations in Google Calendar. Since each e-mail has a different link for each recipient, it is harder for spam filters to detect anything wrong.

So, even if you use an anti-virus tool on your computer, you may not be safe from these attacks.  There are other solutions from the security companies like using certified e-mail, web page scanners and browser security tools which can be used to prevent yourself from hacking and phishing attacks.  The ultimate tool, however, is being cautious and not to click on any link which looks suspicious or install any application from an unreliable source.