Ask and Advertising

[ihelpyou]

I'm seeing a great many TV ads in the US for the ask.com search engine. They have made lots of changes in recent weeks with a new CEO... Jim Lazonne, and other major changes.

Do you think they will make a strong attempt to cut into the market share of Google and Yahoo? We know MSN is having a hard time doing it, but what about Ask?

What else could Ask do, or do better, to have the greatest chance of cutting into the search share?

I'm all for more search engines with their own algos and spiders.

[Connie]

Do you think they will make a strong attempt to cut into the market share of Google and Yahoo?
I think they have been doing that for sometime. But it looks like they are intensifying the effort. I'm sure they will get some gain in the market share, but how much is a guess right now.

[JohnC]

I think they are going to have to settle for second tier ... :(

The new CEO used to be the #2 guy, he moved up because Steve Berkowitz the old CEO jumped ship to MSN ... :)

I think standard marketing analysis place the normal number of major competitors in any industry at 3. Sometimes its less, but almost never more.

I am not sure exactly what they could do, but odds are as soon as they do it, one of the other three will have it too and then what?

[WebSavvy]

That's the problem though. As soon as one of them come up with something great that sets them apart from the herd and is completely unique, the other Johnny-Me-Too's come running and copycat the hell out of it until it's not great anymore, not unique anymore, and sets the originator right back into the herd again looking for that something, or that edge, that will be the divide to set them apart.

What they need to do, is if they develop some unique USP, they need to patent the idea, copyright it, or trademark it (any and all of which may apply) to keep the Johnny-Me-Too's off of the bandwagon.

[ihelpyou]

Another problem they have. How long has it been since we moved these forums from one domain to this one?

3 months or so I believe.

MSN, Yahoo, and Google all noticed the 301 redirect almost immediately and dropped the old to pick up ALL the new. Ask.com has did NOTHING as of yet.

I find that real pathetic. They really need to catch up to the big 3 in more ways than one or two. Having real stale pages in their index does them little good at all.