IAC's Ask rolls out deal coupon search feature

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ask, the search engine owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, unveiled a new service on Tuesday to help consumers seek out coupons for saving money when shopping online.

The new service, Ask Deals, helps users search the Web for deals available by aggregating the best offers to a proprietary database of more than 1 million offers from national and local merchants.

Ask's management hopes by having a dedicated "deals" tab on its search engine page the feature will become a natural destination for consumers looking to save money with discounts on goods and services.

Ask has added features such as helping consumers share coupons and deals through email and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Users can also sign up for "Deal of the Day" emails.

The majority of Ask's revenue comes through a search advertising partnership with market leader Google Inc, which brings up links of relevant advertisers in response to a user's search query.

The Ask network was the fourth most-used search engine in the United States with a 3.9 percent share of all search queries in August, according to Web measurement firm comScore. Google had 64.6 percent market share, Yahoo had 19.3 percent share and Microsoft's new Bing search engine had 9.3 percent share.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Matthew Lewis)