Ask.com admits defeat in mainstream search
Ask.com is to withdraw from competiting against Google in the keyword search market and return to its ‘question and answer’ roots, it has been reported.
As a result of the restructuring, the company will shed 40 jobs, which is around 8 percent of the existing workforce.
Despite significant investment and an expensive global advertising campaign Ask.com has failed to gain much of a foothold in search, with only 1.3 percent worldwide market share in Feb 2008.
Ask.com CEO Jim Safka said the company has made the decision to target their core market with something more akin to their old Q&A model. According to the company, 65 percent of Ask.com users are women, with the largest concentration located in the American Mid-west and aged in the late 30s.
“If we can do a better job of understanding who these customers are and answering their questions, we will grow,” said Safka.
The move has disappointed many observers in the technology industry, who felt that the Teoma search engine that powers Ask.com and its new Ask3D format were innovative and could have presented more of a challenge to Google if given the chance.
Although Ask has denied that the Teoma engine will disappear, there are rumours that it could now turn to Google to provide its search results; allowing the company to scale back its engineering workforce and reduce costs. The ad deal between Ask and Google in Nov 2007 appears to make this possibility more likely.
It appears that the failure to improve market share, coupled with the cost of investing in better search technologies and a large-scale advertising campaign strongly criticised for failing to adequately convey the benefits of the engine have left the company with little choice but to retreat back into its niche.
Ultimately, the withdrawal of Ask will make little difference to the Google dominated landscape. Instead, the acknowledgement from yet another competitor that they were unable to directly compete might be more symbollic of the increasing consolidation and lack of serious alternatives in the search market.
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