Ask.com Gives Up On Search

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Ask.com , announced on its blog Tuesday  that it is getting out of the search business.

The company announced that it will be closing its offices in Edison, N.J. and Hangzhou, China eliminating about 1/3 of its work force.

The company is switching gears and will focus on building out its online question-and-answer service and outsourcing all other search to “multiple third party structured and unstructured data feeds that, when integrated, can provide a web search experience on par with what we are able to produce internally, at much lower costs”

According to comScore Ask.com had 3.7% of the search market in September.

IAC/InterActiveCorp bought Ask.com and its affiliated websites for $2.3 billion five years ago.

Here is the official blog post from the President of Ask.com Doug Leeds,:

“I wanted to share some difficult news made known to our employees today.”

Ask.com will close our offices in Edison, N.J. and Hangzhou, China effective over the next several months”.

“This move was and is difficult, mostly due to the talent, hard work, perseverance and friendship that we have shared with the teams in these offices over many years, but we feel strongly that in the long run this is ultimately best for the Ask.com business and its users.”

“I’ll crib this post a bit from my internal message this morning, and try to keep this as honest and open as possible. While extremely hard, this decision was made for a number of reasons we believe will ultimately benefit our company and our products, including cost, office location, and—most importantly—focus.”

“As our loyal staff knows best, Ask has taken a lot of flak through the years, fairly and unfairly, for not having a focused, cohesive strategy, for ping-ponging across different approaches and marketing tactics.”

“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.”

“Unfortunately, this absolute focus means that we need to stop investing in things outside of providing users with the best answers, including making the huge capital investment required to support algorithmic web search development.”

“This investment in independent web search is not required by our strategy, nor is it required in the marketplace. We have access to multiple third party structured and unstructured data feeds that, when integrated, can provide a web search experience on par with what we are able to produce internally, at much lower costs.”

“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.”

“Beyond this, our proprietary Answer Products will continue to be a key point of differentiation for us in the Q&A space. We will continue to make the technology investments necessary across all of these fronts to develop the very best Q&A experience on the Web.”

“Consolidating our engineering resources in a central location – our Bay Area headquarters – will also make it possible for us to swiftly respond to the hyper-competitive arena that Q&A has become. We need a team that is able to work side by side, face to face, idea to idea, as much as possible. We simply aren’t able to do that with our team fractured across the country, across the globe.”

“These reasons don’t make it any easier to say goodbye to many of our colleagues in Edison and Hangzhou, and we are making it a priority to do as much as we possibly can for every person affected by this, including comprehensive severance packages, end of year bonuses and job placement services. Where we can, we will also offer a number of people the opportunity to relocate to our Bay Area offices, which will grow incrementally so that we can continue building, enhancing and delivering on our Q&A strategy and product lines.”

“I want to close by thanking  and recognizing the incredible employees that have helped Ask become what it is today, and what we hope it will be in the future.”

“Your contributions will long be remembered and valued.”

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. Dzinerfusion says

    Well there goes another search engine. Just goes to show that it is nearly impossible to compete with google.

    Baidu is having luck because of China’s restrictions, and the only major search engine left is Bing, which is owned by one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft.

  2. Jim Fleming says

    “I wanted to share some difficult news made known to our employees today.”
    Ask.com will close our offices in Edison, N.J. and Hangzhou, China effective over the next several months”.
    ===

    Wait, a few hours ago, people were reporting that SECO employees move between companies with 10x salary increases ? …billions in bonuses ?

    Are we back on Planet Earth now ?

  3. Jim Fleming says

    “Well there goes another search engine. Just goes to show that it is nearly impossible to compete with google.”
    ===

    It may show the tide is finally turning. “Search” circa 1995 makes little sense.
    As Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt often asks, “Who is going to pay the electric bill for all of the servers?” There were some blog discussions floating around about FB’s 30,000 servers and how that was “noise” in the GooglePlex.

    As S.C.U.B.A (not Cloud, FOG) begins to become reality, old-school companies will fade away.

    “Search” circa 1995 makes little sense.

  4. Jim Fleming says

    “Search” circa 1995 makes little sense.

    If you want a simple business to compare, try looking at the TAXI cab driver from 1995 with “leading edge technology” (one web page) and (one domain name).
    …
    Each night SECOs would crawl his page, pulling nuggets from it. Those SECOs would then be ready for a consumer “search”. [TAXI @ location]
    ——————————-
    Compare that to TAXI 2012 where a S.C.U.B.A box is in the CAR!!! It has Objects, smart data. Those Objects exist in a Sea of Objects. They are not crawled, they present themselves to the .NET.
    ——————————-
    [TAXI @ location] then becomes a connection from your objects to those objects.

    Objects are Smart Data. They are active. ASCII web pages are 1995.

  5. Alan says

    I think what he is saying is they are simply not investing any more money into running their own search results. Almost all of Ask.com’s revenue is ad based from Google ads.

    Sad as it is for the employees, if this is the right extraction than kudos as its a brilliant move. Why waste time building a product when you have a partner that provides a much better product at practically no cost to you? I think I remember reading somewhere Ask was getting a 90-95% revenue share from Google and anyone who has ever advertised using Ask would most likely say the conversion, prices and quality are nowhere near what you get from Adwords.

    This doesnt mean they will show any less ads, nor give up any ad revenue – just focus company money and time on building the core product (questions and answers) that is their brand.

    I think its smart and they are not exiting search – just giving up on on their own custom platform. Ask will still retain their market share in search but on paper they will just add 3.7% to Google’s lionshare since all the ads served by ask will now be served by Google.

  7. Matt says

    The advertising on Ask is nowhere near Adwords because Ask puts your listings on content partner sites the majority of times.

    Ask is one of the highest converting networks around. It converts better than Yahoo and Google.

    Just go and buy Google ads through the Google search network and track the conversions of anything that comes from Ask.com. You will quickly see it converts better than Google search itself as Ask appeals to the less savy audience. Which in return means more sales.

  8. DomainsPriceWorldRecord.com 99.9% OFF says

    “that it is getting out of the search business”

    Yahoo now uses the Bing’s engine

    Ask will go out from the SE business

    Bing and the MS web division lose half billion $ per year

    the next step?

    Bing+Yahoo sold to Google in 2012 for $1 with over 90% of the SE market in Google hands!

  10. chris says

    This was bound to happen. I mean in all reality have any of you ever used ask.com? I did and that was YEARS ago. Actually more like over a decade ago. Now the only SE I use is google – along with….just about evey other person in this world.
    It’s only a matter of time before bing bows down to google and gives up. The only time i used BING (actually live) was when they had their cahsback promotion. I belive they had up to 30% cash back when they first started – now the promotion is gone and im back to using google.
    The smaller guy always gets outsourced, put out of business, or simply squashed by a bigger company – welcome to america everyone – Home of capitalism.