Ask.com has been through quite a few overhauls in its existence. You cannot deny their persistence, and quest for innovation in the search engine space, but unfortunately it’s bringing them very little in terms of market share.
In their latest update, they’re delivering on the promise they gave back when they were called Ask Jeeves: if you ask a question, instead of a simple list of results, you get more structured data that tries to directly answer your question.
I’ve tried out a couple of examples with great results. The questions “how old is the Earth” and “who is Bill Clinton” yielded perfect answers, while others, such as “What are iPhone’s specifications?” yielded no direct answer, but (unlike Google) gave me a direct link to Apple’s iPhone specifications page.
However, as always, it’s not hard to think of questions that Ask.com will not be able to answer. The problem with this “semantic” approach is that you soon find out that asking questions doesn’t always work, so you’re tempted to switch back to your “regular” way of searching: stringing relevant keywords in hope to find a related web page. Ask.com has an answer to that, too; a new option on the front page called Q&A returns results solely in the form of questions and answers related to your search, taken from sites such as Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers; grouping these indexes was probably a relatively simple affair, but the result is quite usable, and I reckon that those seeking direct answers will immediately switch to this option.
There are more changes under the hood. Ask.com’s CEO Jim Safka claims the site has been rebuilt from the ground up, yielding more relevant results and doing it faster than ever before. It’s hard to judge if this is true as I cannot directly compare the old version with the new, but I was quite pleased with the results of some simple searches I’ve conducted. Is it better than Google? Probably not; as I’ve speculated once before, it’s nearly impossible due to the fact that everyone who’s SEO-aware builds their web pages for Google.
The question for Ask.com is: should they try to be the general purpose search engine, or should they find a smaller, more convenient niche? Their refocus on giving direct answers, like they’ve done with this latest update, could give us (no pun intended) the answer to that question.
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IAC, the holding company of major online properties like Ask.com, Match.com, and Ticketmaster, announced today that it has completed the much-anticipated spin-off of HSN, Inc., Interval Leisure Group, Inc., Ticketmaster and Tree.com to IAC shareholders and retained the litany of more profitable companies. According to IAC, the move will be best for all parties involved and let the newly-formed companies blaze their own, independent, paths.
The very fact that IAC was required to even engage in a spin-off underlies the issues many companies are facing after acquiring popular online properties and holding them in the hope that they will grow in popularity and yield a positive ROI. And although the companies IAC was forced to spin-off were seemingly fine acquisitions, when one consults the company’s latest quarterly filing, it becomes blatantly clear that this move was best.
According to IAC’s second quarter financial statements, the company incurred a staggering $421 million loss, representing a $500 million swing since last year when it made a $94 million profit. But after the spin-off, the new company is doing much better and according to its financial statements, would have grown by 49 percent and incurred a loss of just $18 million. More importantly, Tree.com and HSN, the two biggest culprits in the decline in IAC’s value, are left to smolder on their own without impacting the company’s bottom line.
But along with cutting its losses, IAC is becoming a more agile company instead of a media conglomerate that’s trying desperately to stay relevant in a constantly changing Web environment. Now, IAC has a slew of great properties, headlined by Ask, Bloglines, Collegehumor.com, and Match.com, that more adequately adapt to the changing Web landscape and solve a specific need.
In a Web environment where CPM is down and more sites than ever are battling for your time, services like Tree.com and the entire HSN network are becoming far less necessary. And in the process, these sites are losing money at an astounding rate and pulling all of IAC down with them.
The new IAC is much stronger without the companies it spun-off. And although Ticketmaster was still profitable, that too has been losing ground over the past few years and could easily be supplanted by a service that streamlines ticket purchases in a new way.
Kudos to IAC. For the first time in the past year, it looks like it is on to something with its new strategy.
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Google has already won the search battle; everyone already knows it’s the place for search, and it is now enjoying the fallout, consisting of late adopters, tech-shy users and others who are less likely to switch from sites they’ve been using for years, but they’re slowly hopping to the bandwagon. And no one is leaving.
That’s one way to explain Google’s relentless upward trend in the search market. There are other explanations, but there’s no denying the fact that everyone else is losing market share, and Google is gaining more and more of it.
comScore numbers for April show that Google has extended its lead month over month, rising from 59.8% to 61.6% in overal market share, while Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask have lost 0.9%, 0.3%, 0.2% and 0.4%, as you can see in comScore’s table below.
It will be very interesting to see how these numbers will look now that Microsoft has launched its Live Search CashBack initiative. I sincerely doubt that it will significantly impact Google, but Microsoft might snatch some market share from other competitors. mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/23/latest-comscore-search-stats-google-up-everyone-else-down/
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Silicon Alley Insider reports that Ask has just launched a news site called Big News in partnership with Digg that, from the looks of things, only partially incorporates social news functionality.
There were rumors just earlier this week that Digg was white labeling its technology for Ask. However, Big News is more akin to Google News or TechMeme than to Digg. The bulk of the news items collected and displayed from around the web are identified algorithmically, not socially.
Digg’s only clear influence on Big News shows up in the footer of the site, where you can view the current top five Diggs and five stories collected by Big News algorithmically that haven’t been Dugg yet. This real estate will help drive traffic to Digg and encourage the identification of interesting news stories. What does Ask get in return? That’s not altogether clear, although SAI hears that “Digg ratings factor into the site’s algorithm.”
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