Ask.com changes focus

A story appearance on CNN reported that Ask plans to serve "a narrower market consisting of married women look for help managing their lives." so, Ask's CEO Jim Safka has been quoted in the press as expression "The company found that about 65 percentage of its user base are women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Middle West and sou'-east." So does that mean the little search engine that could is now going to spend all its time answering questions about formula, hobbies, children's homework, amusement, and wellness?

It surely seems that way. Ask laid off only 40 people, but that figure represents about eight percentage of its work force. Ask spokesman Nicholas Billy Graham claims the eliminated positions cut across all divisions of the company. It wasn't the people themselves who were superfluous so much as the place, which were "not wholly aligned with the new concern strategy," according to Billy Graham. Ask plans to  hire people for new place to "grow core teams" for Ask's new way.

Significantly, one of the people leaving the hunt engine in this round of layoffs is Gary Price, the company's director of online resources and, among other things, the affair to librarians. It's impossible to take this move as anything other than a sign that Ask has decided to throw in the towel when it comes to the full general search concern. With less than a five percentage share of the searches conducted, Ask seems unable to alteration people's habits. Too many of us defaulted to using Google.

In this article, I hope to give you a historical overview of Ask, and discuss the forces that led to this decision. I'll also cover some confusion in the press that persists at the time of writing, as well as some of the reactions to this move. Finally, I hope to talk about what the future of Ask looks like moving forward. So without further ado, let me proceed to write the article I hoped I'd never have to write.