Ask.com Is Leaving The Search Engine Market

Well folks, we have another search engine that bites the dust. Just in, Ask.com is laying off 40 employees which equate to 8% of their staff and will be soon be restructuring their site to cater to middle aged married women by providing them with easy ways to get answers to common questions they have. The decision comes after an ever failing attempt to compete with Google.

Yet another dot Com failure. But should this come as a surprise? Granted, I was really hoping to see someone step up the the plate and provide some real competition with Google. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Google, I think they are awesome. But a world with competition is a much better place. Competition keeps things real and fair and provides the best service to the consumer.

I have mixed emotions about Ask.com biting the bullet. I remember them clear as day back when they were Ask Jeeves. I really used to enjoy their site and found it very helpful. My wife especially enjoyed it, go figure! In my opinion, I felt like they were closer to anyone else providing competition with Google. Their search technology was amazing but really they lacked traffic. They tried and gave it full effort as I remember seeing many Ask.com television commercials. Somehow, they just couldn’t hit home with their message and not many people made the switch.

Back earlier in 2007, I did make the switch for a week to give them a full test of their services. Unfortunately, Ask.com is no Google. They don’t have Gmail, they don’t have notebook or many of the really cool things that Google has. I’ll give Ask.com this, they did have a very accurate search engine. All in all, it’s a shame to see them pull out of the search engine market, I felt like that had really good potential.

So what is next? Hmm… do you think Yahoo will make a bounce back? What about MSN/Live.com? Will there be anyone out there who can compete with the almighty Google? Where is Google’s weakness? What can someone do differently that Google isn’t already doing?

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Tags: Ask.com Search, dot Com Failures, Search Engine News

Posted on March 5th, 2008.

3 Comments! Join The Discussion by Leaving Your Comment.

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Owen Wrote a Comment:

Date/Time: 3-5-2008 19:01:21 Comment #12123

I really hope that Microsoft doesn’t take over Yahoo! so that they don’t mess it up. I really like some of the cool things yahoo does. I especially like Yahoo! Pipes and the way that you can get RSS feeds from search results. One thing I would like to see yahoo do is build upon their site explorer.

I think search engines need to take the Google approach and go minimalistic. Google has had very few interface changes over the past 10 years. I can’t count the number of times yahoo has changed their layout or, moved something on me.

DogPile has a cool idea and I think its pretty cool but I don’t really use it that much. Other than that I think Google has the market place for now.

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Jacky Supit Wrote a Comment:

Date/Time: 3-5-2008 21:40:42 Comment #12143

I think ask.com is not that bad actualy.
it’s just they don’t have the luck like Google have. And you’re right Garry, they are too focus only on their search engine, while we can clearly see that google, yahoo, msn all those search engines leaders survive because their other services.