John Battelle gave a good perspective in his Searchblog as to why Ask is taking such a big risk with a new approach: “Let me summarize it for you this way: This is Ask, a perennial 4th place player in an increasingly one player market, doing what only a 4th place player can do: Throwing caution to the wind and betting on a new interface, one that abandons the ‘ten blue links’ approach that has dominated search for so long.” In short, Ask needs to do something desperate if it hopes to climb out of its current obscurity.
Ask currently holds only five percent of the search market. It has been trying to build on that share with a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to raise awareness of its brand. Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, the company that owns Ask, has publicly state his goal of raising the search engine’s share of the market to 10 percent.
Will the new interface change that? Well, when Ask tested it out on five percent of its traffic, it had an interesting, counter intuitive effect: people actually spent less time inputting queries. As Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask, explains, with the new interface, “They don’t need to iterate as much. They don’t have to hunt and peck.”
That’s great from a search tool perspective, but it’s not helpful from a marketing perspective – unless users completely change their view of Ask. Currently, most people see it as a sort of “back up” search engine, to be used when Google or one of the other big ones doesn’t deliver. If searchers started seeing Ask as a possible primary search engine, that could turn Ask’s market share around – and turn it into the little search engine that could.
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