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Great place to chat & exchange different views you might have about the IT world.Ask.com – the information revolution?
08. May 2007
Ask.com is getting more and more traffic and is now standing as a real alternative to Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search.
What is Ask.com?
Ask.com is owned by IAC Search & Media (InterActiveCorp), a company which use many websites, portals and downloadable applications in order to deliver information - ask.com, askforkids.com, bloglines.com, evite.com, excite.com, funwebproducts.com, iwon.com, myway.com - to name just a few. IAC is an American company with its headquarters in New-York headed by billionaire CEO Barry Diller. In 2006 revenues were up to $6.3 billion and they are now employing more than 20000 people.
A bit of history: Ask.com was founded in 1996 by Garret Gruener and David Warthen. Originally, the search engine was named Ask Jeeves. The concept was good, Jeeves was “answering” questions placed in natural language. Outrun by Google, Yahoo! and MSN, “the big 3” indexing every day more and more pages and are known for presenting relevant answers based on keywords researches. But what was their strength became a weakness. Fast indexing and enormous databases, with the link spam and other problems, the number of irrelevant results are increasing. At the same time, Ask.com is indexing pages slower and more thoroughly, so it didn’t suffer the amount of computer-generated spam and is still finding significant Web pages nevertheless.
Something new?
In late 2005, Ask Jeeves started to change its image. The immediate result was a disassociation of Ask and Jeeves by February 2006. They then implemented a complex relevancy evaluation algorithm like link popularity, click popularity, etc. They establish keyword-based research, but maintained the natural question answers. This has shown to be very successful, so that major search engines have implemented this way of searching too. Try the "Ask.com way of search" - go on Ask.com and state a natural question like “Who invented the World Wide Web?” or “Who is Sherlock Holmes?”
What is Ask.com trying to do?
In early 2007, Ask.com started an massive advertising campaign in London. The main theme of this campaign is disinformation and change of public information resources. Directly, the big search engine, Google is targeted, with Ask's information-revolution, as they call it.
If you go to the information revolution website, you can read on the main page, “Most people get online, use whatever search box is there, and just click on whatever results they're given, without thinking about what they might be missing. We're trying to spread the word about searching differently. Different results, different tools, different features & things that could help you get stuff done faster.
Unfortunately, most people have stopped searching for better search. They use the search engine that came with their computer, the one that's attached to their email, the one the press writes about, the one their friends use, even the one their mum uses. The environment for 'other' search engines has become downright oppressive.”
The Ask's “Information Revolution”
A real revolution or just a big marketing trick? I bit of both I believe.
On YouTube, you can see the whole marketing campaign they are currently running.
Acting like underground rebels, their advertising campaign is well planned. They have created interrogations and waken the curiosity to try something new. Because if you think further, there is a real information monopole status for Google. 50% of people are using Google for finding information on Internet without trying another way.
If you would like to know more about search engines, read this article...
Contact Anja on +44 (0)20 8144 6655 for more information on how to raise your marketing to the next level using Search Engine Optimisation.
Article by Guillaume Rembert @ Tetridia
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