Questions for the Ask.com Man
Ask.com may not have Yahoo's traffic, Microsoft's muscle, or—after last week's YouTube acquisition—Google's sex appeal. But CEO Jim Lanzone still insists his company can hold its own in the search wars. Since it was relaunched, and renamed, in February—after being acquired last year by IAC/InterActive Corp.—the site formerly known as AskJeeves has become the fastest-growing search engine in the United States. It is building on a small base, of course: Ask's 6 percent market share places it well behind search's Big Three. But search is the biggest market online, and with 40 million users worldwide, Ask's rising fortunes can't be ignored. Lanzone spoke with Senior Editor Justin Ewers.
Why the relaunch and name change?
We were dealing with a 10-year-old brand with Jeeves and one that was closely identified with the dot-com boom. The brand had some baggage in terms of being known for having a poor product in the late '90s. It also had the baggage of being known as a pure Q&A site. Questions are only about 10 percent of all searches.
People didn't realize Ask was no longer a Q&A site?
In subsequent years, Ask has built world-class search technology and become a much more comprehensive search engine. Consumers didn't know that and weren't giving it a chance beyond the Q&A niche. The relaunch in February was a way to take the shackles off and let us flap our wings as what we've truly become.
What has changed technologically?
We're actually doing a lot more with "search" than Google or the other search engines. A lot of this talk about the other search engines is about the things they're doing on the operating system or in word processing or in building WiFi networks or purchasing real estate—it's not about search itself, which is still by far the No. 1 user need online. This year alone, besides relaunching our site, we also launched what's been called the industry's best image search, the best map search, the best blog search, and we have a few others up our sleeves. These are all at the core of what people use the most.
How are your search results different from Google's?
[We] take search beyond just link popularity—what's known now as PageRank—where you're seeing how many votes a site gets and how big those sites are that are voting for other sites. [Our] technology breaks the Web down by topic and clusters it into communities. Then it analyzes popularity within those communities. What you get from that is more credible and authoritative sites on the subject.
Why is that?
Say the query is "fantasy baseball." On Google, you'll get ESPN and Yahoo! as the top two sites because they're the largest. But if you play fantasy baseball, you know those aren't the most authoritative fantasy baseball sites. On Ask, you'll find more niche sites that are respected by the experts in the field. You won't see that on every query, but on a lot of queries that makes a big difference in the quality of the results.
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