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).
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.