Reflections on Ask.com

November 13, 2010

Ask.com used to be the premier search engine for the Internet. According to the article, “IAC’s Barry Diller Surrenders to Google, Ends Ask.com’s Search Effort” they don’t even break the Top Five. Because of this backslide, Diller’s corporation will be laying off 130 engineers and letting the competition take most of its brute force, Web search business.

In the era before Yahoo and Google you could type in any question and your trusty guide, Jeeves, would take you anywhere you needed to go. Not anymore. It seems that Ask.com can no longer keep up with the Jones’s or, in this case, the Google. The write up asserted:

It’s become this huge juggernaut of a company that we really thought we could compete against by innovating. We did a great job of holding our market share but it wasn’t enough to grow the way IAC had hoped we would grow when it bought us.

Google has grown to be the world’s top search engine, and it seems to control 65 percent of the searches performed in the United States.

Some observations:

How long will Google be able to sustain brute force indexing? The more interesting services use human input to deliver content.
Who will be the next Google? Maybe it will be Facebook?
With the rise of “training wheels” on search systems, will most users fiddle with key words? Won’t “get it fast, get it good enough” may become the competitive advantage?

Google is now the old man of search. I see the company moving clumsily. There was the “don’t go to Facebook” payoffs earlier this week. There is the Facebook game and Google watching from the cheap seats.

Changes afoot. I fondly recall the third tier consultant who told me that Ask.com was a winner. I assume that young person is now advising the movers and shakers about search and content processing. Maybe Google needs an advisor to help the firm move from the cheap seats to the starting line up?

Stephen E Arnold and Leslie Radcliff, November 13, 2010

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Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Facebook, Financial, Google, News, Online (general), Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.