Ask.com Gives Up Search Efforts, Will Focus on Q&A

Ask.com, the perennial underdog in the search game is giving up its search efforts and will be focusing exclusively on Q&A from now on. Most of the company's search team will be let go. The search engine will not be shut down, as it still commands a piece of the search market, but Ask will outsource crawling, indexing and ranking, most likely to Google.

"Ask has taken a lot of flak through the years, fairly and unfairly, for not having a focused, cohesive strategy, for ping-ponging across different approaches and marketing tactics," Ask.com President Doug Leeds wrote on the site's blog.

"The current team ended that. We know that receiving answers to questions is why Ask.com users come to the site, and we are now serving them in everything we do," he said.

Ask currently has two search teams, one in Edison, New Jersey, and the other in Hangzhou, China. All employees in China will be let go and 20 of the 60 employees in New Jersey will be relocated to the company's headquarters in California.

The reason for the move is that Ask found that it couldn't really compete with Google. While the site has pioneered some technologies and features, it never managed to gain too much market share.

Google dominates the search market globally and in the US, on which Ask's efforts were concentrated. Yahoo also gave up the fight and has recently outsourced its search efforts to Microsoft.

Google and Microsoft control well over 90 percent of the search market between them. Google already has a deal with Ask to provide some search results and advertising. In time, Ask search results will be served more from partners, probably Google though the company hasn't confirmed this, and less from its own database.

Ask says it will focus on its re-ignited Q&A efforts. Last summer the company announced that it will be relaunching a Q&A site. The site started as a way for people to ask questions and get answers from humans rather than algorithms.

"Make no mistake that execution of our Q&A strategy still requires a great deal of technology investment and technical innovation, much of which is search-related, involving crawling and indexing the web’s breadth of questions and answers, and using search-based algorithms to route the right question to the best potential answerer," Leeds explained.