Ask.com made the call last December to throw nearly all of its marketing resources into NASCAR in the first half of 2009, making it one of the rare brands to invest during the heart of the recession. Up against search-engine titans Google, Yahoo! and MSN, the company’s leaders decided they had to be aggressive, harsh economic times or not. Six months later, a new head of the company is facing a new decision: Whether to stay in the sport.
When Digg introduced a new toolbar in early April that added a thin strip – known as a ‘frame’ – to the top of pages submitted to Digg, a publisher outcry forced the social media aggregator to back down.
IAC/Interactive this morning posted Q1 revenue of $332 million, down 10 percent from a year ago, but a bit above the consensus at $329.7 million. However, the company lost two cents a share in the quarter on an adjusted basis, worse than the Street estimate for a break-even quarter.
Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You’d dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you’re just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the “West Coast elite” or “digerati” you say.
With Ask.com introducing the AskEraser–a switch that will stop the site from collecting information about a user–it’s worth checking in on the real state of play with the accumulation of data online.
Well, OK, not that big a shocker.
Google’s share of the U.S. search-query market improved to 65.1% in November from 64.49% in October and 61.84% a year ago, according to data released today by Hitwise.
Yahoo’s share slipped to 21.21%, down from 21.65% in October and 22.43% a year ago.
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