Today Ask.com, once a powerful contender in the search engine industry, laid off most of their search engineers, and has stepped out of the search engine market. Although Ask.com will still provide a search feature, the service and the algorithm will now be contracted through one of their competitors, likely Google. Since 2005, Ask.com has been owned and managed by IAC/InterActiveCorp, and it’s IAC that finally decided to get out of the search engine business. According to Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC, “We’ve realized in the last few years you can’t compete head on with Google.” One of Ask.com’s competitors will now take over for Ask’s algorithm, and although IAC will not disclose who due to a confidentiality agreement, IAC already has a separate partnership with Google, and it seems likely that Ask.com may become another source of Google’s market share.
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| Will Ask.com become another arm of Google? It seems likely, but Bing has also been making aggressive moves to gain market share. |
So what does this mean in terms of search engine marketing? Ask.com makes up only 2% of the search engine market, but that 2% equated to 184,518,000 searches in June 2010. If Ask.com becomes another appendage of Google, all of those searches would essentially be Google searches, and use the Google algorithm. This isn’t the first big change like this to change SEO marketing. Only about a year ago did Yahoo stop using their algorithm in favor of Microsoft’s Bing, which now has the added social search feature of Facebook. Bing has been fairly aggressive in trying to gain market share, so it may also be possible that IAC could be working with Bing rather than Google, but only time will tell.
Written by Brennan Mack