Ask.com is not shutting down. They are ending their in-house general crawling & search system to focus on the Q&A aspect. These articles[1],[2] have better details. They will be continuing to offer general search results on ask.com, but outsourced through an unknown provider.
"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.
Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.
Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."
Ex Ask.com engineer here, left around a year ago. The big focus on Q&A and the (partial) outsourcing of general web search had been going on since early 2009, if not even earlier. And yes, it's Google.
Oh well, it's been a good run, I've been expecting something like this to go down for quite some time now. I'm actually surprised Diller hasn't pulled the plug yet for good.
If any engineers from Ask.com are seeking employment, please drop us a line - http://is.gd/gSyDd
I'm sad to see them go - they actually innovated a lot of the things Google ended up using (topic-specific link popularity as a concept, the preview pane, the 3 column layout for search, etc.). It sucks to be the first to do something right, then see the market leader simply take your ideas and run with it.
It may be an unpopular opinion, but sometimes it's nice to have multiple companies competing in the longterm, and for the market leader to struggle to keep their lead.
If ask.com and bing.com move out of the search space or turn off the lights (hypothetically), then those are two fewer companies competing with Google and driving their innovation. If you have many companies in the field, this isn't a huge deal, but search has (as far as I can remember) been dominated by a few giants, had a high barrier to entry, and seems to be shrinking every year. In this case, the market has done some good, but Google could always create a better search product - and if they didn't, then we would need competitors to do it.
"The free market system is working" really isn't a very nice response to "our company is desperately trying to maintain a revenue stream" (which is probably an exaggeration of ask.com's current financial situation).
If Google becomes so good at the search game, thus end up with a monopoly, why should we care at all?
Would you complain if oils are cheap as a result of an oil monopoly?
In any case, google have thousand of engineers working on search results, trying out day in and day out outcompete bing.com and other search engine competitors.
That's a sign that merit decides the fate of corporations.
Google isn't a monopoly yet, so they still remain innovative; Just like Internet Explorer 6 was, until it wiped out remaining competitors and established a monopoly.
I'm not sure that's such an unpopular opinion. And if it is, I'd ask the naysayers to entertain the thought that the definition of a 'monopoly' might be different in the digital age (as so very many other mutable concepts are).
That Ask.com still has 1%-2% of US search traffic is astounding. It must be people using browsers with the default search engine set as Ask and not knowing any better.
I had my dad start using Ask Jeeves some time back in the 90's. Altavista had gone south and the online search space was very fluid, I thought that Ask was pretty decent, and Jeeves was kind of cool back then. I was surprised when visiting him a few months back to see the site come up as his home page, he said it always did what he wanted so he never changed.
It sounds like his dad never tried Google, thus there was nothing to "stick".
I think the lesson here is that while the search engine switching cost is $0, people are creatures of habit and may continue using something long past its expiration date if it is returning expected results.
What we see from this case is also why IE has such a huge market share. Less computer literate people will start using whatever some more experienced entity tells them to, and will keep using it until/unless they are forcibly switched to a new platform.
They say "Google isn't sticky" because they think that search engines aren't sticky (they just happen to be doing the analysis relative to Google); flatline's father "sticking" with Ask is a counterexample of a search engine being sticky.
GP post was using 'Google' to mean 'search', as in 'search isn't sticky'. But if someone has stuck with Ask for a decade out of habit -- that's a small example otherwise.
IAC still distributes the Ask.com toolbar which is installed on close to 100 million computers.
"The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon"
As much as I am not a fan of Ask.com's UI (too much clutter and annoying ads) there is still quite a bit of valuable content that ranks fairly high in search results.
Unfortunately I can't point to anything I searched for recently to back this assertion up.
"Though its traditional search business hasn’t grown, IAC is increasing its “toolbar” business, which places various clickable tools on the browsers of Internet users, and enables IAC to collect a fee each time the toolbar is used."
It's sick how much money IAC is making from this crap.
The second startup I worked for ended up folding and selling the smoldering remnants of any intellectual property worth having to David Warthen. It was also a solution for a problem no one had, but with a similar slant to the product Ask was offering.
I think Bing is doing well enough that Google is having to keep pushing. It has less a share than IE had at the start of the second browser war, so it's not like it can't be overcome. Then you look at smaller engines like DDG and while I'm sure they aren't big enough to be tracked at the moment, I'm also positive Google has them on their radar.
That's a shame. I found them better/more-interesting than Google for a number of queries. Not on average certainly, but on enough queries that I was pretty interested in their technology.
I remember them trying a lot of things, such as the Peek feature that Google is now using. Sad to see them go. But, like everyone else, I never used them.
"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.
Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.
Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."
[1]: http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-en... [2]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/iac-s-diller-surren...