Ask.com and Lexico Publishing Group, owner of the three very popular websites Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com, have announced that an agreement was reached and thus the first will acquire the latter for an undisclosed price. There is however some available information that can roughly point out what the company is worth: last year, Lexico came very close to being acquired by Answers.com for $100 million. It is rumored that a similar amount will be paid by Ask.com.

88% of Lexico’s traffic is made up of users who directly type the company’s website addresses; this demonstrates brand strength and low use of intermediary sites.

Ask.com is looking to improve its services and this is the reason why it wants to get in on the constantly rising action of the three websites. Dictionary.com for instance had around 15 million visitors in March alone. According to Ask.com’s new chief executive, Jim Safka, a traffic shift between the two websites will be attempted; besides the definitions of Dictionary.com, users will also be given the possibility to search for related information on Ask.com. This could eventually turn out to be quite efficient; expectations are high: company officials are hoping that the acquisition will determine its user base to go up by 11%, thus reaching about 145 million monthly unique users.

Ask.com is currently the no.4 search engine, following Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.