Ask.com on the Google Aardvark Event
February 16, 2010
I had this article “Ask.com Comments on Google-Aardvark Proposition in Search” in my to-do pile for a week. The comment that jumped out at me – well, a modest jump – was a comment allegedly made by Doug Leeds, President, Ask.com-U.S.:
“Google’s purchase of Aardvark is simply an acknowledgement that Q&A is the future of search. As the #1 brand in Q&A, we’ve been passionate about investing in this next phase of search for a long time. Our current technology is unmatched at answering questions using content we’ve crawled and indexed from across the web. In Q2, we’ll also beta launch a Q+A community that will route the questions we receive to real people with relevant knowledge. This community will reach search engine scale – able to handle more than a million questions a day, faster than Google or any of our competitors. We’re singularly focused on Q+A because, in the end, we believe that consumers rather Ask a question, than Google one.” –
My question, “Why didn’t Google buy Ask.com?”
History maybe? also remember Ask.com because of its search journey: buying Direct Hit, selling the template system as an enterprise product for customer support, the Teoma.com technology, the wild and wooly architecture talk I heard from an Ask.com rocket scientist, the shifting to niche search, and the reintroduction of the butler in the UK.
In the late 1990s, AskJeeves.com entered the search market with its question-answering service. My recollection is that there were “templates” against which a user’s question was matched. Over time, AskJeeves.com morphed into Ask.com and the question-answering angle came and went and came again. Over the years, Ask.com’s Web traffic was stable and it was consistently lower than Google’s. Even Microsoft’s Web search has pulled more traffic than Ask.com. I recall one azure chip consultant telling me that Ask.com was the next big thing. I forget the person. I remember the comment because it underscores the failure of some so called search experts to know much about the world before these pundits discovered Google. Sigh.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2010
No one paid me to take this walk down memory lane. I suppose I must report having forgotten to charge someone to write this short opinion piece. Who’s in charge? Maybe the VA? I forget. But I still remember that azure chip consultant who told me Ask.com was the next big thing. Perhaps.
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