Ask.com to refocus away from search, towards Q&A

Ask.com is not shutting down. They are ending their in-house <i>general</i> crawling &#38; search system to focus on the Q&#38;A aspect. These articles[1],[2] have better details. They will be continuing to offer general search results on ask.com, but outsourced through an unknown provider.<p><i>"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.<p>Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.<p>Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."</i><p>[1]: <a href="http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-end-web-crawling-55209" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-en...</a> [2]: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/iac-s-diller-surrenders-to-google-juggernaut-ends-ask-com-search-effort.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/iac-s-diller-surren...</a>

If any engineers from Ask.com are seeking employment, please drop us a line - <a href="http://is.gd/gSyDd" rel="nofollow">http://is.gd/gSyDd</a><p>I'm sad to see them go - they actually innovated a lot of the things Google ended up using (topic-specific link popularity as a concept, the preview pane, the 3 column layout for search, etc.). It sucks to be the first to do something right, then see the market leader simply take your ideas and run with it.

That Ask.com still has 1%-2% of US search traffic is astounding. It must be people using browsers with the default search engine set as Ask and not knowing any better.

"Though its traditional search business hasn’t grown, IAC is increasing its “toolbar” business, which places various clickable tools on the browsers of Internet users, and enables IAC to collect a fee each time the toolbar is used."<p>It's sick how much money IAC is making from this crap.

The second startup I worked for ended up folding and selling the smoldering remnants of any intellectual property worth having to David Warthen. It was also a solution for a problem no one had, but with a similar slant to the product Ask was offering.

I suppose it's unfortunate in that a lack of competition won't push companies to develop exciting new search technology.<p>On the other hand, I haven't used it for many years and haven't heard anything good about it either.

That's a shame. I found them better/more-interesting than Google for a number of queries. Not on average certainly, but on enough queries that I was pretty interested in their technology.

I remember them trying a lot of things, such as the Peek feature that Google is now using. Sad to see them go. But, like everyone else, I never used them.

Probably the highest-profile dotcom providing a solution in search of a problem, I don't think they ever really settled into place.