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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