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Ask.com is retooling its business strategy to be a destination that helps users find reference information, such as online dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias and area codes, as well as answers to health and entertainment questions.
Responding to reports that portrayed the company’s goal as a move to become a search engine for women, Ask.com spokesman Nicholas Graham told eWEEK March 6 the “idea that we’re going to become a women’s site is just plain wrong.”
“We’re going to the people who use us the most for certain kinds of things in a certain kind of search pattern and we’ve decided, ‘Let’s embrace them and build around them,'” Graham said.
His comments came two days after the company told news outlets that it would lay off 40 people from various parts of its business, and not target search for the general masses the way Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do. The strategy update also comes after the company denied it was going to let Google run its search engine business.
After reading reports from mainstream media, several bloggers, including Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, saw the move as a capitulation by Ask.com, an admittance that it could not compete with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in top-line search.
Graham stopped short of saying that, but noted that Ask.com “can’t be all things to all people. That’s not going to work. We have to focus and build from a position of strength and our strength is delivering good results to people who come to us seeking answers.”
He also suggested that some media outlets concentrated too heavily on the fact that Ask.com said it will tailor its search to be more friendly to its base, which is 60 percent women. He said new CEO Jim Safka made the decision after joining the company in mid-January and finding that a sizeable number of its core search base were women.
A Married Womans Search Engine
Sullivan dismissed Graham’s comments as after-the-fact spin, noting that most of the coverage he’s read in the mainstream press supports a common theme that Ask.com is targeting women with a question-answering service.
“Ask hasn’t really budged the needle before on general searchers,” Sullivan told eWEEK. “To focus more tightly is going to pigeonhole them. They’re probably already pretty freaked that a general audience is now going to dismiss them as the ‘married woman’s search engine,’ and that goes right back to them clearly not having their heads around what it takes to compete in the space now. Because you would never, ever let that kind of message go out.”
Meanwhile, Graham stressed the company is not “pulling the plug” on its Teoma search engine, but will build it out to help users find answers based on questions, not just keyword queries.
This system recalls the Ask Jeeves search engine the company launched with in 1996. Rather than entering just a single search term, users would type in a full-length question and Ask Jeeves would provide answers.
Graham said the company will go beyond the traditional question-and-answer approach of Ask Jeeves by providing search that will not only be “visually compelling, but will crawl user-generated content to help inform and build out the search engine.”
Though he stopped short of calling it social search-or relying on the collective search queries of previous users-many search engines large and small are heading in that direction.
“A lot of people come to us and type in questions,” he said. “We need to build it out and build around that and blow it out a lot more.”
Graham said the company is hiring new people to help it with this new business direction.