The New Face/Phase of Ask.com
October 7, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik
Yesterday, Ask.com released a new version of their search engine. How many more times will this happen before Ask.com is either sold, or turned into something else than a search engine. With about a 3-4% market share, it is incredibly hard for Ask to compete in the search market trying to even beat out MSN which can barely compete against Yahoo and Google.
I’m all for competition, but I believe Ask.com (with that domain name) can be more successful as a question search engine (when it was AskJeeves, still a search engine) that can play more of a part of a question search engine like Yahoo Answers, etc. Why doesn’t MSN buyout Ask.com and gain a bit more market share?
With its prior release last year of a 3 colum search engine, which had great look and feel, Ask.com went back to the very basics, Google search engine model of “simple” search returning a plain search results page with its paid search.
Here is what Ask.com looked like:
What it looks like now:
