Free Pizza

The design packs a lot more content, despite remaining elegant and unfussy. On the top right are a bunch of thumbnail images. (Google, of course, has links to an image search from the main results page, but given that users are often looking for one of the top image results, it's handy to have these on the main page. Ask offers six or so.)

Beneath these are video thumbnails which start playing when you hover over them, and on the left, under the headings 'Narrow Search' and Expand Search', are suggestions for refinement. (A search on Ephesus, the ancient city in western Turkey, for instance, suggested narrowing to 'Biblical Ephesus' and 'Temple of Artemis at Ephesus', or expanding to 'Pamukkale' and 'Pergamum'.)

Perhaps Ask's most useful feature, however, is a set of binoculars next to each of the main links which, when the cursor hovers over it, pulls up a snapshot of the 'linked to' page. (This function is particularly useful for travel websites, whose user-friendliness can mostly be judged immediately, even from a thumbnail.)

Will all this be enough to win over a Google disciple?

"The first thing I have to do is take umbrage at that question," Mr Lanzone says. "We have over 50 million users worldwide. We're one of the top web properties. It would be a mistake for us to say we want ten out of ten Google users to switch over. One in ten would be a good start, though."

How do you start the ball rolling, then?

"We're confident that if people give it a try, they'll see. We're of the view that the search market won't consolidate into one standardised experience. This is information – it's not a commodity – and the idea of getting all your information from one source is almost Orwellian. We think there will be a slice that prefer the Ask experience."

IAC doesn't specify Ask's earnings in its reports, but in a recent quarterly statement, its Media and Advertising division, of which Ask is a part, reported a slightly smaller loss – $10.7 million ($5.3 million) – that it had for the same period 12 months ago (11.3 million).

Overall IAC's net income dropped 33.3 per cent, from $81.5 million (£40.1 million) to $54.4 million (£26.8 million).

The immediate objective for Ask, Mr Lanzone says, is to grow search volumes in the second half of this year.

Two big UK launches are also imminent – one a mobile search service which will link with a phone's GPS, the other a 'next generation' algorithm which purports to rank sites not just according to the web's link structure, as Google's PageRank does, but by incorporating the relative expertise of sites that link to them. ("Who would you rather be guided by – a crowd of regular people, or experts?")

As one of a number of bosses whose companies play David to Google's Goliath, Mr Lanzone knows he has his work cut out. In the words of another, Dominic Trigg, of WebFetch: "We have a long way to go."

But if he doesn't succeed, it won't be for want of enthusiasm. "I really believe in our product. Every day I get up, I can't wait to use it," he grins.