AskX Impressive for Approximately Five Minutes
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | December 21, 2006 | Share This
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Ask.com is rolling one punch after the other as they wrap up the year with two, possibly three, new major services. AskCity debuted last month as a roll-up of IAC’s local properties - Citysearch, Ticketmaster and Evite (basically a glorified version of Maps). AskX came out yesterday, Ask’s new search portal, and today Barry Diller announced that Ask News is due out “very soon”, following the buzz around AskX. The goal behind the IAC’s whirl of new services, according to Diller, is to double Ask’s search market share “within the next few years”. AskX, specifically, is meant to “change people’s habits” by offering a superior product to Google (and other search engines). Says Diller, “The roadmap for ask is fairly deliberate. What we think we’ll have is a good search engine, but unique…value added services. Ask will become a virtuous circle of information and commerce.”
AskX, like Live.com, has redesigned its SERPs as a point of differentiation. For example, the query “cars” generates three columns of nice boxes that show images of “cars”, “cars” the movie, shopping for “cars”, the definition of “car”, and a search box for “car” business listings. The boxes are handy, but SERPs are still slower, inconsistent and no more relevant than google. In his review of AskX, Larry Dignan sums it up, ” I gave AskX a spin and came away impressed. But five minutes later I was back to Google.”
Ask only needs 2.5% more of the search market to double its traffic - but even so, it’s dubious whether or not introducing a “superior search” product will have a lasting impact on users’ fundamental behavior. Ask is certainly not the first engine to re-vamp its homepage in an attempt to steal single percentage points from Google. Microsoft recently launched their own “superior search” portal with Live.com - and yet, in that time period, Google traffic went up from 60% to 70%.
Topics: SEM: Firms |