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IAC-owned Ask.com has agreed to acquire Lexico Publishing Group, the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

The move will help Ask.com fulfill its recent strategy to focus on reference and providing answers to questions. More than half a billion monthly worldwide searches consist of dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia queries, according to comScore.

The acquisition brings to Ask.com 15.6 million monthly unique users, growing 29% year-over-year, giving the combined entity more than 145 million unduplicated users worldwide, making Ask.com the ninth-largest Web property in the world. A full 88 percent of Lexico sites’ traffic comes from direct navigation, where users type in “dictionary.com” or other site names in their browser.

“We think it fits in very nicely with what we have at Ask.com,” Doug Leeds, chief strategy officer at Ask.com, told Search Engine Watch. “We’re going to take some of the things that make Ask.com great, like related search and binoculars, and bring them to Dictionary.com.”

The Lexico sites will also be redesigned to include the three-paneled Ask3D functionality for its search results, he said.

For dictionary.com, the move brings users closer to their next or previous destinations, which quite often is a search engine, Leeds said. The addition of Lexico’s reference sites will improve Ask.com users’ experience as well, since more than 30 percent of all searches conducted on Ask.com are in the reference category.

Terms of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed. Once the deal closes, the 16 employees of privately held Lexico are expected to join Ask.com’s team.

Facebook lives! Reports of Facebook UK’s death? Greatly exaggerated.

Rocketing up the charts in today’s Nielsen social search Top 10 is Facebook, up 712 percent year-over-year. Facebook leapfrogged 15 places in the most popular social media site rankings, winning third place with 8.5 million UK visitors.

YouTube, Facebook and Slide top the list of the most popular and fastest growing social media Web sites in the UK, according to Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company. Nielsen’s data, released today, proves that reports of social media’s demise in the UK may be unfounded.

In the UK, 20.8 million people (63 percent of Britons online) visited at least one of the ten most popular social media sites in January 2008. That’s a 21 percent increase over last January (17.1 million).

YouTube has replaced Wikipedia as the UK’s most popular social media Web site.

Biggest Winners: Facebook and social networking add-on tool, Slide.

Biggest Losers: Friends Reunited and Google Video.

Facebook and Slide broke into the Top 10 by ousting Friends Reunited and Google Video (falling to 16 and 14, respectively, compared to January 2007).

Prediction: Google will retire the Google Video brand and roll it into YouTube by the end of 2008. Both are video search engines. Universal search makes Google Video as a standalone property obsolete.

RIP Google Video: the first Top 20 Web property buried six feet under the World Wide Web?

We’ll be tracking whether UK cable TV (MTV Two) can drive traffic and registrations to a social media site. MySpace (News Corp) and MTV (Viacom) will launch a weekly TV music video countdown show (MySpace Chart) only on the U.K. network MTV Two, not to be confused with MTV 2 in the US.

Think TRL with a social twist.

MySpacers and MTV site visitors will be able to vote next week on the top videos ( mtv.co.uk/myspacechart) on MySpace and MTV Two’s dedicated landing page.

My Space Chart launch date: March 16. Mark you calendars and start tracking on comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen.

A complete list of the current MTV Two UK chart toppers after the jump:

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On average, online retailers still only convert two to three percent of visitors into buyers. Though people are buying more online than ever before, that number has remained consistent over the last three years.
The three percent conversion average is also consistent across studies by different organizations, according to e-Marketer. That means that 97 percent [...]