Ask.com: is there Room for Another Major Search Engine? - Ask.com’s Challenges
(Page 2 of 4 )
One of Ask.com’s major hurdles is fairly obvious to anyone who used the search engine in 2000 or so and then abandoned it. At that time it was supposed to offer an alternative to the other search engines, in which users entered keywords. Rather than putting in keywords, searchers were supposed to be able to use natural language. Put in the question “What is the capital of Nigeria?” for instance, and AskJeeves was supposed to be able to give you the answer.
Well, Google and MSN can do that now, but back in 2000 no search engine could really handle natural language questions well. And sadly, that included AskJeeves. The faithful butler was far more likely to serve you less relevant results than the other search engines, and the advantage of being able to use plain English wasn’t big enough to offset this problem. This is especially true when you consider that searching by keywords isn’t that much less “natural” than searching by asking a question. Those of us old enough to remember card catalogues did it all the time.
Six years later, many of us still remember AskJeeves as a rather unhelpful butler, which we stopped using in favor of Google or Yahoo! because they delivered the results we needed. By retiring the butler, owner Barry Diller hopes to retire that image. But getting rid of a bad reputation that the search engine no longer deserves is only part of the battle.
Ask.com also needs to fight ingrained habits. Many web surfers no longer search for something online; they “google” it. While some SEOs will optimize for Yahoo! or MSN, the most active forums always seem to be the ones discussing Google optimization. If we remember the old saw that one calendar year equals four Internet years, Ask.com is effectively asking web surfers to kick a twenty-plus-year-old habit. We all know how hard that is to do when we want to; how hard a sell do you think this will be when there doesn’t appear to be a compelling reason to switch?
So, in the highly competitive field of search engines, Ask.com faces two handicaps: a bad reputation it currently doesn’t deserve, and web surfers’ ingrained habits. It is also fighting a related problem: publicity. Diller sounds envious when he observes that “Google hasn’t spent a nickel on marketing. Google sneezes and it’s on the front page of every paper in the world.” But it is (or should be) a truism in public relations: if you want to be talked about, you need to give people something worth talking about. Is Ask.com’s latest overhaul worth talking about?
Next: The Soul of a New Interface >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
