Ask.com will reinvent itself once again
Everytime Ask.com goes through changes, it makes me miss Jeeves that much more. Their latest rebirth, though, might be the closest thing to their former search engine.
Ask.com has decided to stop trying to compete with Google. They will retool their website to appeal to married women. Women will be able to find a recipe, find help with their children’s homework, and other related topics. Ask.com will be returning to its original idea of answering questions that are relevant to women’s issues.
In 1996, Ask established itself as a search engine that people could ask questions and find relevant results. Ask would display a list of questions to help narrow down search results and display only relevant results.
Ask will lay off 40 people, about 8% of its workforce.
I believe this to be a good move for Ask.com. What made them unique was their natural-language search engine, where people could ask questions and find exactly what they are looking for. I was coming around to the new Ask.com since their relaunch last year. It is a good search engine service but for plain search results, it’s hard to beat Google. Sadly, that’s what most people are looking for - just search results - not related content or songs they might be interested in because of their search.
Being 5th when it comes to search engines, this restructure of Ask.com seems like a wise move. To be able to focus on one area could possibly generate more loyal users. Moms are always busy. To have a search engine that can find what information they need without having to sort through pages of search results should be quite popular. Now if only Ask.com will bring back Jeeves.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
I bookmarked your site and will be back here soon. Good luck with it all.