ASK.com returns to its Roots
Ask.com, once positioning itself as a search engine to rival Google, has changed plans and is instead targetting itself as a search engine for married women to find answers to questions about managing their lives. In making this change, it has laid off 40 people, or about 8% of its workforce. It saddens me to see this as Ask.com had some of the best search technology and was the most innovative of all the search engines.
Ask.com says that the new focus will help energize the company by providing a clear focus and increase profits as married women are a prime advertising target. This seems like a good move for Ask.com - instead of fighting head to head with Google, they are instead concentrating on dominating a lucrative niche in which they already have mindshare and experience. The new focus will also change the search engine landscape dramatically. Instead of four main search engines, now there are three. With Microsoft attempting to buy Yahoo!, this could reduce the number of major search engines to two.
Source: Jeff Behrendt writing for DomainNews.com - Original Post on March 6th, 2008