Ask.com's days as a search engine are over, or at least its days as a player in the search market are done. The company's November 9 blog update announced that the channel will still focus on offering the best answers to online consumers' queries, but it will be abandoning web search development. This means marketers have one less search engine to consider when optimizing sites – though they may want to monitor Ask.com for buzz about their brands.
Just three months ago, Brafton reported that Ask.com was magnifying its search capabilities to position itself as a social search engine, but now the company says it has been taking flak for not having a clear focus. In response to this feedback, Ask.com officials want to put their energies into promoting what the site does best – answering users' questions.
"[T]his 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," says President Doug Leeds. While this strategy will still require technical innovation in order to offer the best answers to consumer queries, development of the company's own web search system has proven unnecessary.
Leeds told Bloomberg that Ask.com just can't compete with Google. Hence, the company will be developing its own Q&A niche online, and it may see success in this arena.
Search Engine Land cites data from Ask.com's recent internal brand survey that shows the site ranked above Google when consumers were asked about "websites where they could ask questions and get answers" came to mind. With this in mind, marketers should monitor the answers to questions surrounding their answers or specific brands.
