Another one bites the dust!

Ask.com will cut workforce by 40 in makeover as women's search site
By Michael Liedtke
Associated Press
Article Launched: 03/05/2008 01:36:44 AM PST

In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.

As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its workforce.

With the shift, the Oakland company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies and children's homework.

The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the southern and midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.

The quest intensified after Internet conglomerate InterActiveCorp bought Ask and its affiliated Web sites for $2.3 billion in 2005. But Ask.com remained an also-ran, despite spending tens of millions of dollars on an advertising blitz about dozens of new products that impressed many industry analysts.

Through January, Ask ran the Internet's fifth largest search engine in the United States with a 4.5 percent market share, according to comScore Media Metrix. Google dominates the industry with a 58.5 percent share.

"No matter what (Ask) did, it just wasn't enough to get people to leave Google," said Chris Winfield, who runs a search engine consulting firm, 10e20. "This looks they are raising the white
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flag."

Jim Safka, who became Ask's chief executive two months ago, predicted the retooling will breathe new life into the search engine.

"Everyone at Ask is excited about our clear focus and the trajectory-changing results it will deliver," he said in a statement.

With Ask scaling back, the online search market could winnow to two dominant players, Google and Microsoft. Now third in the market, Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo, which runs the second largest search engine, for about $40 billion.

Ask's inability to increase its market share had spurred widespread speculation that Barry Diller, InterActiveCorp's CEO, might hire Google to run the search engine's results to save money.