Ask.com: is there Room for Another Major Search Engine?
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AskJeeves is still around, only now it has a new name: Ask.com. It also has a new owner as of last summer and a cleaner interface. Can it survive without its venerable butler? And is it serious about taking on Google?
It’s not often that a company retires a mascot that has served them faithfully for a decade. But that’s what happened last month when search engine AskJeeves changed its name to Ask.com. After surviving a diet, a wardrobe malfunction, being turned into a robot, an invasion from Google’s Matt Cutts which the faithful butler captured on film, and finally being frozen in carbonite, Jeeves has richly earned his retirement. But where will Ask.com go without him now? And is the search engine up for the challenges it faces today?
To say that Ask.com faces some serious challenges in the competitive search engine market is an understatement. According to data from online traffic research firm Nielsen/Netratings, Ask.com receives just a little more than two percent of the search queries in the United States. Other companies are kinder in their compilations. ComScore Media Matrix’s figures for December gave Ask.com a 6.3 percent share of the U.S. search engine market, up from 5.3 percent a year ago.
Compared with its competitors, that’s trivial. ComScore’s numbers give the lead to Google with 40 percent, followed by Yahoo! at 29.5 percent, and MSN at 24.3 percent. Even AOL, at 8.5 percent, is beating Ask.com. This leaves Ask.com a distant fifth. No wonder they retired the butler.
The changes to Ask.com go far beyond the cosmetic, however. Visitors to the site won’t see the familiar figure of Jeeves, but they will see a much cleaner interface that features a “toolbox.” Jim Lanzone, general manager of Ask.com U.S., describes it as “like having a speed dial to the best search has to offer.” It might take a bit more than a speed dial to save Ask.com, though, especially given the hurdles the company must face if it hopes to become more relevant in users’ minds.
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