Ask.com has given up the Google ghost and gone back to their question and answer service of old. They’re laying off 130 engineers and consolidating the rest of their skeleton staff at company headquarters in California. Suzanne Morrow, Senior Copywriter at Dog Digital asks; is there really room for more than one search giant out there?
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, was launched in 1996 and was hugely popular at the time, handling upwards of 2 million search queries a day. As Google grew, Ask’s pulling power dwindled and so did its technology.
Back in 2005, internet giants IAC injected around $1.85 billion into Ask, in a bid to sharpen up its competitive edge. It’s taken a lot of flack over the years, fairly and unfairly, for never really having a focussed or cohesive marketing strategy. It simply hasn’t had Google’s muscle or might.
For Barry Diller, CEO at Ask, the thinking seems to be, why go another round when Google are just too big to defeat?
Google now dominates every part of our lives, not just in the search engines. There’s maps, mail and more. A recent Neilson put Google’s US market share at around 65%, with Bing and Yahoo! its biggest rivals. In the UK they have an even bigger market share – over 90%. But, this wasn’t always the case.
In the 90s, back when jeans were baggy and hair was big, Excite was THE search engine on the web. Founded in 1994 by six Stanford University students, initially under the name Architext, it went on to become one of the most well known search sites of the decade.
The company survived the collapse of its merger with high speed internet provider @Home, an acquisition by Ask.com and its eventual sale to a traffic regeneration company. Today it provides the latest in personalised search services. It’s active in countries including Italy, Germany, France and Spain and attracts over 5 million unique users every month.
Lycos is one of the most widely-known internet brands in the world and evolved from one of the first search engines on the web, into a comprehensive social media website that includes blogging tools, web publishing and hosting, online games, email and search services. Lycos.com consistently averages around 12 -15 million users each month. It was the first profitable internet businesses in the world and when it started making money it spent it. Fast. Tripod, Anglefire and Matchmaker.com: It bought them all.
Today, both Excite ad Lycos have expanded somewhat to offer email and domain purchasing services, along with search.
Then there was Alta Vista: the hot young thing at the time. The simple interface was uncluttered and had some powerful backend hardware. It was one of the first search engines to offer advanced search techniques. It its glory days it managed around 80,000 hits a day (Wikipedia figures). Sadly, it’s now just another Google Clone.
Google’s success owes a lot to timing. It began to take off just as the dotcom bubble was about to pop. The competition that had previously been flying, was now plummeting.
WebCrawler was created by a University of Washington student back in 1994, initially just as a web application. It was the first search engine to have full text search capabilities, which looked at every word on a site’s indexed pages, rather than just a sample portion. It was impressive enough at the time to attract buyouts. Excite in 1997 and Infospace in 2001, which went on to buy it.
Now WebCrawler is a comprehensive search engine, compiling all of the net’s search engines to provide ‘definitive’ results. It currently gets around 1,700,000 visitors each month.
It’s expensive to stay on top. When you’re as big as Google you’re effectively a self-generating money machine. The word ‘google’ has entered the global lexicon and stands for web search much like Kleenex does for tissue or Hoover does for the vacuum cleaner. No other search company has been quite so lucky in being able to infiltrate our subconscious.
Yahoo! used to be the world’s number one search engine but has since “outsourced” its search functions to Microsoft Bing – the biggest challenge to Google, if ever there was one.
By Suzanne Morrow
Senior Copywriter
Dog Digital
www.dogdigital.com
