Rumors last week that Ask, the IAC-owned search engine, was about to cut 100 jobs overestimated the body count. In fact, Ask is trimming 40 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce. Newly appointed CEO Jim Safka, who replaced Jim Lanzone, is also going to refocus the brand to go after women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users (65 percent).
No word on what will happen to Ask’s Teoma search technology (the rumor was that Google would be replacing it, since it already handles Ask’s search advertising). Safka is obviously taking more of a marketing than a technology approach. But without improving actual search results (with technology), Ask is going to have a tough time maintaining its 4.5 percent market share. Ask’s search sites collectively brought in 41 million unique U.S. visitors in January, which was up from December and November, but still below October’s 44 million, according to comScore.
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Ask is rumored to be considering switching to Google for search and subsequently downsizing its engineering team.
According to Silicon Alley Insider, Ask may abandon or selling its Teoma search engine in favor of using Google for its search results. Teoma has powered Ask since it was acquired in September 2001. The decision will result in “bad news for Ask Engineers.”
Paid Content puts the downsizing figure at 100 in April, although they note that the final decision on the switch to Google hasn’t been signed off on yet.
The decision to abandon Ask’s in-house search engine comes following a $100 million advertising campaign in 2007 that succeeded in growing Ask’s market share, but not to a significant level in the overall market. Google already provides Ask with its search ads through a recently renegotiated, five-year, $3.5 billion deal.
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Silicon Alley Insider reports that Ask has just launched a news site called Big News in partnership with Digg that, from the looks of things, only partially incorporates social news functionality.
There were rumors just earlier this week that Digg was white labeling its technology for Ask. However, Big News is more akin to Google News or TechMeme than to Digg. The bulk of the news items collected and displayed from around the web are identified algorithmically, not socially.
Digg’s only clear influence on Big News shows up in the footer of the site, where you can view the current top five Diggs and five stories collected by Big News algorithmically that haven’t been Dugg yet. This real estate will help drive traffic to Digg and encourage the identification of interesting news stories. What does Ask get in return? That’s not altogether clear, although SAI hears that “Digg ratings factor into the site’s algorithm.”
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While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S.
In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent of global share. (Although, in the U.S., Yahoo actually gained a half-point of share in December, whereas Google dipped 0.2 percent). 
The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet. No. 3 on the list is not Microsoft, but Chinese search engine Baidu (with 5 percent share, versus Microsoft’s 3 percent). No. 5 is Korea’s NHN Corporation, which operates the Naver portal and search engine. Creeping up on Ask’s No. 8 spot, is Russian search engine Yandex. And Alibaba (which may include Yahoo China) brings up the rear at No. 10.
Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.
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