Ask.com acquires Dictionary.com, Reference.com and Thesaurus.com

Ask.com have announced they have acquired Lexico Publishing Group which operates dictionary.com, reference.com and thesaurus.com.

Terms of the deal, set to be announced today, aren’t being disclosed.

With the addition of the widely used reference tools, Ask hopes to make more money showing ads to people looking for answers to basic questions and to distinguish itself from online search leader Google Inc. and other much larger rivals.

“We want to ’super serve’ those people,” said Jim Safka, who runs Ask for its corporate parent, IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Ask plans to plant some of its search engine results on the reference sites in an effort to expose its technology to an even wider audience.

Dictionary.com is the most popular of the newly acquired reference sites, drawing 22.1 million visitors worldwide in March, according to the most recent data from comScore Inc. That represented a 20 percent increase from the same time last year.

For the full press release go here.

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