In case you havn't seen, Ask quit web search

[TallTroll]

http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-end-web-crawling-55209

It's a shame. I never really used them much, but it was mostlybecause I never liked the layout much. With the way Google has been going, I can see myself looking for a new default SE soon, and my choices ae now one fewer

[PaulH]

Surprised they lasted this long, they were rubbish at doing search, maybe they can get the Q&A stuff right

[mick g]

I'm surprised they last this long too, they lost the plot when a few years ago they decided to concentrate just on woman search then they brought the butler back out of retirement

[TallTroll]

To be fair, technically they had a pretty good product, but it was buried under a deadening weight of paid ads, and monetisation. And the deal they had with Google was just rubbish, but the money was good

[mick g]

i dare say they did have a good product but the spidering and indexing was average, it would hit a website and spider everything in no time at all, wait and wait to see the results and bingo..............you got an additional page appear in the results

whoopee do

hands up how many people here could rely on ask results to put food on the table

[littleman]

Yeah, they pulled their PPC engine a coupe of months ago, right before Yahoo threw in the towel on PPC.  It didn't convert as well as the big engines, but with a lot of fine tunning I made it work.  The landscape is getting uncomfortably consolidated.

[bill]

They took Teoma, which was a decent engine in its day, and completely squandered it. I haven't forgiven them for that yet.

[4Eyes]

re: teoma

agreed

It could have been a contender.

It Yahoo had bought Teoma and spent their 'otherwise mis-spent' millions on pushing it, we could have had some real competition for G now.

[TallTroll]

>> their 'otherwise mis-spent' millions

Terry Semel, and everything he ever did, for instance?

[Drastic]

Well damn, there goes my million dollar plan.

I'm gonna miss those 3 visitors per month...