Tag Archives: Ask.com

“Everyone at Ask is excited about our clear focus and the trajectory-changing results it will deliver.”
-Jim Safka, CEO of Ask

Ask.com, the fifth largest search engine has given up chasing after Google, the Goliath of search.  Ask is planning on changing its search engine to make it easier to find answers to questions revolving around homework, entertainment, health, etc.  This goes back to the days when Ask was known as Ask Jeeves.

The consequence of shifting to this new strategy is that they need less of a workforce to do it.  Ask is laying off 40 employees out of 500.  Will these laid off employees Twitter the process like former Yahoo! employees?  Maybe.

InterActiveCorp acquired Ask in March 2005.  Ask was valued at $1.85 billion at the time.  Ask has about 4.5% market share for online search.  Google has 58.5% according to the Associated Press.

Ask.com[1], formerly known as AskJeeves.com, changed around the look & feel of the search engine last night. The new look gives the website more of a three-dimensional look, hence the name Ask3D.

“It’s a pretty radical change,” stated John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media. “Most of the big players have a lot to lose, so they don’t want to shock the system. Ask has less to lose.”

Supporting Battelle’s statement, I believe that because Ask has less to lose, it can readily launch bizarre marketing campaigns such as the advertisement below:

[Source: Search Engine Roundtable[2]]

Below is a screen shot of the new look & feel of Ask.com:

I did a search on Detroit Pistons NBA basketball player, Rip Hamilton and noticed that Ask uses a three-panel system:

In the left panel is related news, search expansion suggestions, narrow search suggestions, and the search box itself. The middle panel has the actual search results. And the right panel has images, a biography clipping from Wikipedia, and blog search results. Each search result website can be saved to MyStuff, a bookmarking system through Ask.com.

“The way we will grow is by increasing the frequency of use of the 30 million monthly users we already have in the U.S.,” stated Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. By consolidating information on keywords from various sources, I think this new look for Ask.com will help the company remain competitive. Ask.com is the #4 search engine behind Yahoo!, MSN, and Google.

Jeeves, it’s been real. Jeeves is Ask.com’s former mascot, a butler that was axed shortly after IAC/InterActiveCorp acquired the company for $1.85 billion in March 2005.

[1] Ask.com
[2] Search Engine Roundtable: SEOs Critique Ask.com’s New “Algorithm Ads”