Ask Gets A Fitting Obituary

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Yesterday morning, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote a blazing obituary of the search engine Ask.com.

What strikes me about this is the anger, bitter tone in which he writes. Yes, Ask.com had some innovation going on. There were a lot of people rooting for Ask. And they might have survived if Barry Diller had shown some stick-to-it-ness. Especially if Yahoo! does end up going by the wayside. Assuming that Microsoft does end up with Yahoo! in its lap, that would effectively make Ask.com No. 3 (I’m not counting AOL, which is just an aggregator), and then Diller and Co. could have focused on chasing Microhoo and outcompeting them. He might have succeeded there.

But, that didn’t happen. Instead, Ask.com went soft. They started talking about being a search engine for women. Restructuring. Yada yada yada. Yeah, as Danny says, we know. You’re all but dead, Ask.

It’s too bad, too, because I was secretly hoping that Ask would be somebody some day. It seems that Ask had so much potential, so much going for it, but what happened? Profits got in the way of greatness. Sad, sad, sad.