Washington — If you have been on the web for around a decade now then you would know that Ask.com, the immortal underdog in the search engine game is giving up its search efforts and will be focusing exclusively on Q & A from now on.
Does Google’s dominance in the search market compelled Ask to leave the search service competition? Ask.com, the Internet search engine that media baron Barry Diller purchased for $1.85 billion to rival Google Inc., is slashing 130 engineering jobs and surrendering much of its search business to competitors.
Ask.com, a section of Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, is packing off engineers based in Edison, New Jersey, and in Hangzhou, China, and stopping work on its algorithmic search technology, according to Ask.com President Doug Leeds.
The search unit will combine its engineering activities at its headquarters in Oakland, California, and divert its resources on developing its online question-and-answer service. Twenty of the technologist currently working in New Jersey will be asked to relocate to Oakland, the company said.
Leeds said that Google has developed into too powerful a competitor to justify Ask.com’s continued pursuit of those search users.
“It has become an enormous juggernaut of a company that we really thought we could compete against by innovating,” Leeds said in an interview. “We did a great job of holding our market share but it was not enough to grow the way IAC had hoped we would grow when it bought us.”
Leslie Cafferty, a spokeswoman for Ask’s owner IAC, said Wednesday that the move was a part of a strategic shift by Ask to focus on its Q&A service rather than the traditional search, which is dominated by Google with over 66 percent share of the U.S. search market.
Cafferty added that Ask, which has struggled to carve out a significant share of the Web search market, is laying off employees at facilities in New Jersey and Hangzhou, China.
Most of the company’s search unit will be relinquished. The search engine will not be closed down, as it still commands a piece of the search market, but Ask will outsource crawling, indexing and ranking, most likely to Google.
“Ask has taken a lot of criticism through the years, fairly and unfairly, for not having a focused, cohesive strategy, for ping-ponging across different approaches and marketing tactics,” Leeds wrote on the site’s blog.
“The current team ended that. We know that receiving answers to questions is why Ask.com users come to the site, and we are now serving them in everything we do,” he said.
Furthermore Ask, previously called Ask Jeeves, accounted for 3.7 percent of the US search market in September, according to figures from online tracking firm comScore.
Besides, search engine monster Google, the number one search provider, controls 65 percent of all U.S. searches, according to Nielsen Co. Ask.com, ranked sixth among search providers, has less than 2 percent.
Cafferty said the question-and-answer service is “an important segment of the Web for Ask” and it is the number one site in the sector.
“Make no mistake that execution of our Q&A strategy still requires a great deal of technology investment and technical innovation, much of which is search-related, involving crawling and indexing the web’s breadth of questions and answers, and using search-based algorithms to route the right question to the best potential answerer,” Leeds explained.
Ask.com is not the only one conceded its search engine venture, another web portal Yahoo has also ceded much of its search business to competitors, signing a 10-year agreement to use Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search technology on its Web properties.
Nevertheless, last week, Ask.com launched its Q&A services for mobile devices starting off with an iPhone App. The company plans to go big on the Q&A service which is deemed to compete with the Quora.com which was founded by Ex-Facebook CTO and VP of Engineering — Adam D’Angelo with Charlie Cheever who led the Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform.
But the demise of Ask.com would not hinder any more search engines to give up. Recently Blekko, another search engine based on Slash technology and there might be many more to come. Not every search engine would come out to compete with someone as big as Google or Microsoft Bing. But for now, let us observe a moment of silence for Ask.com’s search engine and look forward to its Q&A service.