Can Ask become a power search engine?

With their recent makeover and ad campaigns, will they begin to take market share from others? At whose expense will it be, if they do?

 

I am not very familiar with the search engine Ask, I just checked their new design and it looks good, lots of powerful features too. I think they can become a big competitor, but I highly doubt they can overcome Google/Yahoo.

Thanks,
Meti

 

I don't know how they marketed the campaign in the US and the rest of Europe but over here in the UK they had of attack on google (without naming it) by claiming that it was unfair that one se had such total dominance.

I suppose it was a negative campaign if not to shame people, but to make people think about this issue.

But it's difficult to find anybody that has a good thing to say about ask in regards to a search engine.

My own personal experience is that it is so slow in indexing pages.

One of the main points about the internet is its immediate nature, and if it can't capitalise on that then as an internet search engine it is failing.

Another aspect is the algorithms that they use.

I know that MSN, Google and Yahoo are different entities, but at least there is some similarity in their search results.

It is a common complaint, on this forum and everywhere else by webmasters that although they have been ranked in those three, on Ask they have not.

In answer to your question, yes, it can become a powerful search engine, but there's no sign of that at all at the moment.

 

I hate to say this but Ask.com is part of IAC Corp.

Ask is merely a method for IAC to build one way links to hotels.com expedia.com servicemagic.com hsn.com and their other properties.

Ask.com could care less if it takes over the search market, as this is not IAC Corps core business.

Ask & IAC Corp are one of the largest link spammers online but due to the fact they pay Google Adwords multimillions of dollars to advertise their sites Google & Matt Cutts and his spam detection team (cough, hack, scam artists, cheats, liars) allow IAC to spam their index like crazy.

That Google allows Ask.com to spam them so heavily, and yet they do nothing is truly outrageous.

 

I just checked Ask for one of my sites - I set it up under 1 domain last year, then re-directed to a new domain about 9 months ago. Typing in the new domain still brings up the old one for the top results - that's over 9 months behind the times.

 

I like the new look of Ask a lot, but there's one thing that they need to REALLY focus on if they want to be taken more seriously and start stealing marketshare from Google or Yahoo: They need to focus more on crawling and updating listings. Their listings have a tendency to be months old and rarely update. Their cached version of one of my sites goes back about 4 months before I gave it it's last makeover.

 

Thats interesting information and fits in perfectly with everything.

Ask are massive contributors to Adsense, as anybody that uses the that adrevenue will know.

 

Actually Ask purchases Adwords ads, which are then displayed via Adsense publishers and Googles sites.

 

Thats interesting information and fits in perfectly with everything.
I like the new look of Ask a lot, but there's one thing that they need to really focus

 

So what's the one thing then? We're waiting

 

I didn't know that! Thanks for the info. Rep given.

 

usasportstraining

thank you

sherly

On Ask.com investment of $6,000,000.00 in Adwords they must have done very well

As the one unit I studied earned $106,000,000.00

While I doubt the earned 100 million from Adwords ads I am sure they turned a very lucrative profit from such.

If they do that across most of their divisions you can see why Google loves them and gives them special considerations not afforded to most of us

Peace!

 

I don't think ASK can become anything.

The forgotten search engine. They don't even advertise anymore do they!

However, I was round a friends the other night and he was using ASK. Whoa..

 

Actually if you start at the beginning thread and READ.... you might learn Ask is one of the largest advertisers online....

 

something id like to do myself

 

Ask is just too slow to index and update pages. I like the new interface, but to be a real competitor they need to get more up-to-date and relevant info. I would like for them to become a serious competitor to Google, but even Ask's CEO recently said they would be happy with just 10% of what Google has (which is a lot), but I would expect a competitor to want to beat them, not just say they would be happy with a percentage.

 

As others have stated before me, I think they need to:

- increase their indexing rhythm
- advertise like they actually have some taste (there were some horrible ads so far for Ask)
- partner with a browser to become their default search engine, like Google is for Firefox and Live.com for Internet Explorer (maybe Maxthon would be a good choice with the market I hear they got in China).

And something a bit more expensive but shouldn't be a problem for their parent company. Buy the portfolios of the big domainers (hundreds of thousands of domains with type in traffic). It might cost them 1 billion or more, but the top 4-5 domainers combined have as many uniques monthly as Google has . Redirect those pages to Ask.com to the terms they got in their name (candy.com redirected to search results for "candy" on Ask). At the same time gain a huge chunk in market share and strike a big blow to Google because many of those domains are monetized with Adsense for domains.

 

Ask is a load of p**p the search engine doesn't even support nofollow tag.

 

I doubt it, they spent a sh*t ton of money a year or so ago on TV advertising and their traffic barely increased and never at any point looked like it was going to put a dent in the top 3.

 

I must say I have never bothered using ask its tedious and not very accurate.