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.
Algorithms aside, how do you plan on gaining ground on a company—Google—whose name has become synonymous with search?
What's surprising is that we're not having much trouble in that area. We've been the fastest-growing search engine every month since we relaunched. We have over 25 million people a month in the U.S. and 40 million worldwide per month using Ask. Collectively, Ask is the seventh-largest Web property in the United States, ahead of Amazon and the New York Times. What's hard is to make people break their habit of using a different search engine. They get locked in.
Do you think there is room for you to grow?
The average person uses two or more search engines a month. It's not a zero-sum game. I equate it to the Model T. When the Model T came out, everybody was so happy they could drive from point A to point B, no one felt they needed a different car from someone else. We could all have the same black box with a steering wheel. But as time went on, drivers' needs evolved. They needed better ergonomics. They needed faster. They needed a different color. In search, Ask is truly the only other pure search brand to Google. The other players that have search market share are portals. Ask stands for search alone.
Is your audience different than theirs?
It's a more discerning searcher; it tends to be more professional, more urban or suburban, where getting better search matters. There's a part of the market that uses whatever search engine is in front of them at the moment. That's where portals get a lot of their traffic. We call them convenience search or lazy search.
You competed hard against Google for the right to provide search and ads to MySpace. Google won. Why?
The good news is that we were in that game primarily because some executives at Fox and MySpace admired our product from a user point of view. They liked the tools and the features and the search engine and the user interface. At the end of the day, though, it became a very expensive deal. We couldn't stay in the game in a way that was financially sensible for us.
That's the problem with competing against Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin just bought a 767 for their personal use. What do you fly?
I fly United. [Laughs.] Premium economy, if I'm lucky. I'm about to pass the 100,000-mile mark this year, so maybe I can get some better upgrades next year.
Why do so many people still think of Ask as an also-ran?
I think part of that is based on the sheer mass of Google in popular culture today. I really don't believe any brand in history, including Coke, has ever had this much media love. The reality is that Google does not even own 50 percent of market share in the United States—and is just now, with Ask, having a competitor that is a stand-alone search engine beating it at its own game in several ways. Our track record so far should be impressive, because frankly it's been like a 10-handicap golfer beating a scratch golfer with fewer clubs in our bag.