Warthen, who advertised escort services under the name "Brazil," was accused by the Feds of prostitution. According to the San Francisco Chronicle story about her sentencing, Warthen is also now divorced from her husband David Warthen, the Ask.com co-founder who married her just four months after the government seized $61,000 in cash from her apartment, safe-deposit box, a storage locker and discarded law-school textbooks they found in her trash. Whatever will naughty Warthen do at home all day to pay back the government? We imagine Warthen's other tech entrepreneur friends must have some ideas.

Need more examples? Here are commercials from MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. (I found them using Google and YouTube, a Google-owned video-hosting site.) Do any of them articulate a reason to switch search engines?

I jumped on his back and got my arm around his neck tackling him to the ground. We slide up against the brick wall that makes up the stairs going up at Church. I bring my other arm around and push his face into the corner of the wall and the ground with my elbow. At this point I terrified myself a bit as I'm on top of him screaming at the top of my lungs "Give my fuckin phone back bitch!" I grab the phone which is wedged between him and the ground and pry it from his hands.

This all happened before the train left the station. Wood walked back on, to a stunned audience of fellow commuters: A note to Wood: In case you haven't heard, iPhones have gotten a bit cheaper since you bought yours. Thought about just upgrading?

Safka's example — a search for the popular tween star Miley Cyrus which yields TV listings for her Hannah Montana show — looks convincing, at first glance. Neither Yahoo nor Google show TV listings in the first page of search results. But Googling "Miley Cyrus TV listings" readily pulls up a page on TVGuide.com.

Ask.com's strategy relies on the notion that a small team of engineers and product managers can guess what users want, find the right databases to pull the information from, and assemble it more effectively than the dominant search engine's algorithms. It's a romantic notion of man vs. machine. But I seem to recall John Henry died at the end.

IAC is moving ahead with plans to spin off four of its divisions by the end of August: HSN (which includes Cornerstone), Ticketmaster, Tree.com (which includes LendingTree), and Interval Leisure Group, which operates vacation sites including ResortQuest Hawaii. That leaves IAC with Ask.com, Match.com and Citysearch. What's happening? Simple: Diller and company have learned that bundling a bunch of diverse online businesses together doesn't create the promised "synergy" of the Web 1.0 boom. Better to let each site fend for itself. Since IAC got rid of Expedia in 2005 (Barry Diller's still chairman of the board), the travel site's ups and downs have closely followed the travel market. That's the watercooler version. You can wonk out with the full details.

Nor has Google México ever celebrated the country's independence on September 16. Nor has the company ever celebrated the birthday of any Mexican or American of Mexican descent — such as California civil rights legend César Chávez — even though all sorts of folks have been honored with birthday logos. When will Marissa Mayer deign to honor the employees and users of Mexican heritage with their own doodle? Probably sometime after she wears her first Eduardo Lucero.

He and Furka aren't dating, Baker hastened to clarify. "This is different," he IM'd me. "Although, if that'll give her press, we could always do the Jakob and Julia angle." Chadrick, as our mascot, Valleywag does have certain expectations of you. In the clip above, Furka explains the recent bridal extravaganza which got Baker felt up by a hairy man in a dress.

Some think a reduction in workforce is likely. There are no sacred cows, [Ask's proprietary search technology] may be sold or simply abandoned which is hundreds of engineers who work on the core search engine, in place of just using Google's search with our special brand of user interface.

Earlier, a tipster told us to expect a "big shakeup at Ask.com," including "change in product lineup and company direction." Even more recently, we overheard an exec from an IAC subsidiary complain about typical Barry Diller stinginess. "We're not getting the kind of investment we want from IAC," this exec said. "They're cheap."

(Photo by Feistypoo)

(Data by ComScore)