Ask.com Giving Up on Search Business

Posted 11/10/2010 at 9:06am | by Paul Lilly

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When Barry Diller acquired Ask.com for $1.85 billion, he envisioned beating Google at its own game. That was four and a half years ago and the reality of that challenge has finally settled in with Diller. Going forward, Ask.com plans to abandon its search business -- and 130 employees -- to focus on it's Q&A business instead, TGDaily reports.

"We need to stop investing in things outside of providing users with the best answers, including making the huge capital investment required to support algorithmic Web search development," Ask.com president Doug Leeds. "This investment in independent Web search is not required by our strategy, nor is it required in the market place. We have access to multiple third party structured and unstructured data feeds that, when integrated, can provide a Web search experience on par with what we are able to produce internally, at much lower costs."

Leeds didn't say which company would be providing the search results, but with just a 0.65 percent share of the search market (according to Net Market Share), it might not matter all that much.