Ask.com
"Just when you thought Microsoft and Yahoo were going to get on with their lives, it’s (Ask.com) going to paralyze them once again." CEO of Ask.com after acquisition of Lexcio Publishing Group1
Ask.com is America’s fourth largest search engine with a considerable fan following and market share of around 4%. Recently Ask.com has expanded into European and Asian market. Ask.com is known for its technical innovation even thought it is not a market leader in search engine technology, yet it is one search engine which refuses to fade away. Interestingly it has been seen that while Google continues to expand, while Yahoo and Windows Live are struggling to maintain their market share, and one time giant Time Warner (AOL) is now reduced to a small player and gets its search results from Google, Ask.com has managed to retain its small but considerable market share. This may be attributed to heavy spending by Ask’s parent company IAC on advertising and Marketing. But continuous innovation like Ask3D which merges all results with images and maps in same result page, technological advance like morph which intelligently shows most relevant result type, and sometimes cashing on Market situations like the introduction of AskEraser after privacy concerns erupted when AOL released data of 650,000 users have managed to keep Ask.com in the market2.
It has not been shy of competing with the market leaders like Google, its Ask3D feature was a winner over Google’s Universal Search technology3. Its features are so appealing that some of them have been copied by Yahoo and Windows Live like the display of related searches or suggested queries. Ask.com may not seem to rival Google, but its continued survival in search market and ability to generate revenue makes it profitable ...