14 DAY TRIAL // With the economy still in a dire state people are looking to save and they're doing it online. Coupon searches have shot up tremendously recently but no one has jumped at the opportunity to offer a service to simplify the process. Until now that is, as Ask.com, somewhat of a rounding error in the search market, is making another attempt at standing out, and maybe capturing that precious 0.1 percent, with the launch of Ask Deals which displays coupons and other savings opportunities inside the search results page.
“Ask Deals scours the Web for all the deals available online – from savings on ‘skinny jeans’ to restaurant coupons – and organizes the best money-saving offers front and center on the results page, eliminating the need for consumers to search multiple sites or multiple coupon sites or search engine links to find their answer. The Ask Deals database is continuously refreshed and editorially refined, giving consumers the most up-to-date and highest-quality savings offers every time they search on Ask,” the announcement read.
Ask hopes that the new tool will allow users to find savings faster and easier and the deals themselves will show up for the relevant searches in the right sidebar. There will also be a dedicated Deals page available from the Ask.com homepage, which will feature a “deal of the day” as well as other tools and links to related content. The search engine is drawing from over 40 sources to find the coupons and gets the information either by crawling their content or through several partnerships with this type of sites. It also employs several people to manually sort the coupons to find the more valuable ones.
Ask has been hovering at around 4 percent of the search market for quite a while now and, while it hasn't dropped, it has failed to get any closer to the three main competitors – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. The search engine has been known for some of its innovative features but they haven't translated into market share so it's unclear whether Ask Deals will manage it.