Guys,
Today is not a good day for Search Engine Industry. Ask.com decided to give up.
Such a freaky coincidence that i have been using Ask for a couple of weeks now as the main search engine instead of Google. It was not easy from the start but i knew that so i really gave Ask.com a chance to win me this time.
Well as it turns out, it’s a pretty good search engine actually. I have the feeling that it learns the way i search faster than expected. Well, it’s just the feeling.
Anyway, it’s given up Now and “so called” realigning itself to target women ……
I normally don’t do this but Danny Sullivan wrote a very good article that i can’t afford not to put it here. It’s a long article so i only put the first few paragraphs here. If you want to read the rest, please visit the link.
Obit: A West Coast Digerati Deadpools Ask.com
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Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You’d dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you’re just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the “West Coast elite” or “digerati” you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you’re dead. You’re about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon.
It’s OK. It hurts, but we both know it’s for the best. I know what you’re thinking. I can hear you explaining it to me, over and over. IAC chief Barry Diller bought Ask.com back in 2005, gave both Steve Berkowitz and then Jim Lanzone time to try and pull searchers in by being more innovative than Google, and that didn’t work. You tried. But now, it has to be out with the search product CEO and in with something new.
But listen, I say. Ask held its own against the combined weight of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. That was a success, it really was. And Ask WAS innovating. Among the major search engines, it was the only one with something really different, really unique going on. And as we’re about to move into a likely Google-Microsoft duopoly, perhaps Ask’s day was about to come.
Sigh. I know, I know. Innovation is all fine, but why bother if you believe you’ll never grow share? Why not shut everything down that’s new, fresh and expensive to do and just get the most money off the basic traffic you know won’t go away.
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Again, for the whole article, please visit: http://searchengineland.com/080305-095826.php