Ask.com Abandons Search; What Would Jeeves Say?

It looks like Instant Previews was the straw to break the proverbial camel. Ask.com is officially ceding the search market to competitors like Google and Bing. Actually, it has little to do with any specific feature and more to do with the fact that Google has handily dominated the search market for years.

Ask.com President Doug Leeds explained: “[Google's] become this huge juggernaut of a company that we really thought we could compete against by innovating. We did a great job of holding our market share but it wasn’t enough to grow the way IAC had hoped we would grow when it bought us.”

Ask has cut 130 engineering jobs in New Jersey and China and has stopped working on algorithm-based search technology.

If you’ll recall, Ask was originally AskJeeves.com and was a more unique Q-and-A site, rather than just another search engine. The company plans to refocus its efforts on question and answers.

Like Yahoo, Ask.com will continue to offer a search component, but will use a competitive search engine to power its search results. The company hasn’t specified which competitor it will partner with. [via Bloomberg]