Ask.com, The End of an Era for Search

Today marks the end of Ask.com as a search engine, the search giant will lay off once powerful the vast majority of its engineers and to grant a small piece of the search market from Google and Microsoft.
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, was once one of the search engines the world's most recognizable. It launched in 1996 and quickly gained popularity with its emphasis on natural language queries, in addition to keyword searching. At its peak, Ask.com has taken care of 2 million queries per day. Its mascot, Jeeves the butler, was well known by millions of people.
In 1999, the company held an IPO and everything seemed peachy (as most things did during the dot com bubble). You probably know the rest of the story if Ask.com has started to bleed and the relevance of money quickly lost to a more agile competitor, Google. Its market share has declined and its technology has stagnated until it was eventually acquired by Internet conglomerate InterActiveCorp to $ 1.85 billion in 2005.
Five years later, IAC has not found a way to turn the search engine Ask.com as a competitor, despite all his efforts. According to Bloomberg, IAC will cut 130 jobs in Engineering in New Jersey and China, to cease development of its algorithmic search technology, and to refocus its efforts on service Q & A, she launched this summer .
What is the fate of the engine Ask.com 's search, though? Ask.com president Doug Leeds says it will provide search results from one of its competitors, not unlike the case of Microsoft-Yahoo search signed last year. IAC has an existing agreement with Google, but Microsoft has been aggressive in finding ways to increase market share Bing. Jeeves Google
Web site owned by IAC is still one of the best destinations on the web and its research income grew last year (up 20% to 205 million dollars), but mainly because of its activities bar tools. In the highly competitive market research, Ask.com has no chance against competitors who are constantly launching new features.
Ask Jeeves and Ask.com are the spirit of the era of Web 1.0, with a good idea and a smart team, you can launch your idea and spread around the world (and raise excessive amounts of funding the process). Despite its decline since the bursting of the tech bubble, he did much better than many of his other cronies (think Pets.com). It is a testimony to the fact that millions of people still depend on Ask.com as a gateway to the rest of the web.
Although the approach of Google search (speed and simplicity) won is still the end of the Ask.com search engine. It's really a market Google and Microsoft now.