I’ve seen this news on a few online news resources now so it must be true, although it sounds like an early April Fool. Seemingly disillusioned with competing unfavourably with Google, Yahoo and Live, Ask.com has decided to change it’s focus to become a niche engine focussed on women looking for answers to specific questions. In a not-at-all stereotypical analysis, these questions will be for such subjects as hobbies, recipes and children’s homework.

Find out more here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23473125/

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Personally I’m not a fan of Ask particularly, I’m a Google user through and through, but they’d been doing an awful lot to improve the interface of their engine and offer the browser more than just a list of links. You can’t help but wonder whether this has helped spur Google et al on with their Universal Search and improvements to SERPs.

Ultimately, it probably IS a very good idea as it will take a lot to topple Google, Yahoo and Live for general searchers (Google is a verb now, after all) but in a niche market maybe they’ve got a chance. it’ll be interesting to see how they market themselves once the changes have been made…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.