Ask.com became the latest victim of the challenges confronting the search market. In the wake of announced layoffs, the number four search engine said that it would change its focus to concentrate on its core market. What that means exactly seems to be a topic of debate.
A story appearing on CNN reported that Ask plans to serve “a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.” Indeed, Ask’s CEO Jim Safka has been quoted in the press as saying “The company found that about 65 percent of its user base are women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast.” So does that mean the little search engine that could is now going to spend all its time answering questions about recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment, and health?
It certainly seems that way. Ask laid off only 40 people, but that number represents about eight percent of its workforce. Ask spokesman Nicholas Graham claims the eliminated positions cut across all divisions of the company. It wasn’t the people themselves who were superfluous so much as the positions, which were “not completely aligned with the new business strategy,” according to Graham. Ask plans to hire people for new positions to “grow core teams” for Ask’s new direction.
Significantly, one of the people leaving the search engine in this round of layoffs is Gary Price, the company’s director of online resources and, among other things, the liaison to librarians. It’s impossible to take this move as anything other than a sign that Ask has decided to throw in the towel when it comes to the general search business. With less than a five percent share of the searches conducted, Ask seems unable to change people’s habits. Too many of us defaulted to using Google.
In this article, I hope to give you a historical overview of Ask, and discuss the forces that led to this decision. I’ll also cover some confusion in the press that persists at the time of writing, as well as some of the reactions to this move. Finally, I hope to talk about what the future of Ask looks like moving forward. So without further ado, let me proceed to write the article I hoped I’d never have to write.
Search Engine News 
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