Ask Jeeves Gears Up

by Admin


12 Jun
 None    Search Engines


by Rob Sullivan


by Rob Sullivan
http://www.enquiro.com

By now I am sure you have heard that Ask Jeeves bought a small unknown company called Tukaroo. What you may not know is that Tukaroo was in the business to build a search application which could search both your desktop and the web in a seamless "end-to-end" search experience.

Desktop search is the new buzzword these days, with both Microsoft and Google developing these types of applications. It is kind of surprising to me to see Ask wading into this market. At least until you consider what the outcome could be.

Of course if you take MSN, Google and Yahoo! out of the mix for a while, it does make sense. With the recent acquisition of IWon, Excite and Myway and of course the purchase of Tukaroo, Ask is trying to set itself up as a legitimate alternate to the big 3.
And that is what I see this as: A strategy to say "hey, if you're not happy with the other 3 why not check out #4."

I had a whole bunch of analogies last night as I was lying in bed - picturing 3 giants standing face to face, and a much smaller person in the middle, catching those users who fall from the giants' grasp.

Or picturing Ask Jeeves (the butler) underneath a wooden table, and 3 other sitting around the table counting out gold. The butler was catching the dust and smaller nuggets that were falling through the cracks that the three bigger ones didn't care about.

In any case, I think that's what this is going to be like. In their quest for world dominance Google, Yahoo! and MSN will lose many users who fall through the cracks. These are the one''s Ask has to capitalize on. And you know what? It doesn't take too many to fall through the cracks before Ask moves up to #3 in popularity.

I could see them take on the type of growth which Google experienced a few years ago - suddenly coming out of no where to be one of the most popular search engines.

Of course right now there's a big gap between Ask and the top 3. More than 20% of search engine users separate Ask from them, but it's not an impossible number. It may take a couple years but it will happen.

After all, changing search engines isn't as hard rotating your tires. All it takes is a few clicks on a keyboard. And I think that is what Ask is banking on. If they offer the same services as the others, then that removes the competitive advantage that Google or MSN has. What's left?

About the only disadvantage Ask has at the moment is that you have to pay (via Teoma, or Google AdWords) to appear in their search results. Therefore the index grows more slowly and may not be considered as relevant to some users.

But with the purchase of Iwon and Excite, I would hope that they would open up their index and allow free submissions. With the superpowered crawler that Excite has it would be much easier for Ask to crawl more of the web.

Once they did that, one more competitive advantage which the others have would be gone. The size of Ask's index would become on par with the others.

So, if in 12-16 months Ask offers the same services as the big 3, and has the same size of index, and offers about the same results, why would you need to stay with one of the big 3? Why not rotate those tires?

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Enquiro.com

Copyright 2004 - Searchengineposition Inc.


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