Ask.com to focus on married women
SAN FRANCISCO — In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market -- married women looking for help managing their lives.
As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, the company, founded in 1996 as AskJeeves.com, will lay off about 40 employees, or 8% of its workforce.
With the shift, the Oakland company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies and children’s homework.
The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the South and the Midwest comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.
The quest to outdo Google intensified after Internet conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp bought Ask and its affiliated websites for $2.3 billion in 2005. But Ask.com remained an also-ran, despite spending tens of millions of dollars on an advertising blitz about dozens of new products that impressed many industry analysts.
Through January, Ask ran the Internet’s fifth-largest search engine in the United States with a 4.5% market share, according to ComScore Inc. Google dominates the industry with a 58.5% share.
“No matter what [Ask] did, it just wasn’t enough to get people to leave Google,” said Chris Winfield, who runs search engine consulting firm 10e20. “This looks as if they are raising the white flag.”
Jim Safka, who became Ask’s chief executive two months ago, predicted the retooling would breathe life into the search engine.
“Everyone at Ask is excited about our clear focus and the trajectory-changing results it will deliver,” he said.
With Ask scaling back, the online search market could winnow to two dominant players, Google and Microsoft Corp. Now third in the market, Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo Inc., which runs the second- largest search engine, for about $40 billion.
Ask’s inability to increase its market share had spurred widespread speculation that Barry Diller, InterActiveCorp’s CEO, might hire Google to run the search engine’s results to save money.
Google already posts text-based ads on Ask and InterActiveCorp’s other websites in a five-year deal that Diller expects to generate about $3.5 billion.
