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Oct 6 2008 9:50AM EDT

Ask.com and Google's Impenetrable (For Now) Position

Kevin Maney muses: What's it going to take to stop Google in search? It's not apparent right now.


Yahoo Search is never going to do it, because Yahoo essentially offers the same kind of search and same kind of results as Google, and Google has become a habit while Yahoo has not. No matter how Yahoo markets itself, it is destined to be Avis to Google's Hertz; Pepsi to Coke; Frazier to Ali -- or in a worst case scenario, Newark to Manhattan.

Microsoft is having a bit of success in search now that it's borrowing from the last-century idea of banks giving away toasters to people who open savings accounts. Microsoft last week unveiled SearchPerks, a giveaway program that builds on its Live Search Cashback effort. But apparently Microsoft is mostly stealing share from Yahoo, not Google.

So now Ask.com is launching what it says is a newer, smarter version of its question-answering search site. Ask is smart to at least offer a different kind of search than does Google. Results are parsed out and categorized, and when you type in a question, Ask both parses the sentence looking for an answer and also digs through Q&A type sites looking for exactly what you're asking. As I argued a couple of years ago, Ask in some ways is a more satisfying search experience compared to Google. But it doesn't seem to be what the public wants right now.

I'm also not sure about the new version. I tried one question on the site: "Does Sarah Palin have a dog?" The first full answer that came up reads: "Sarah Palin does not own a dog. She kills every animal she sees." Imagine that turning up in sixth-grade civics student's essay.

More than likely, Google is untouchable until some company -- a start-up, I'll bet -- redefines what search is in a way that makes us feel like Google's broad, unfiltered text search is old and cumbersome. The way we felt about DOS after the Mac appeared, or dot-matrix printers after ink-jet. What that will look like, I don't have a clue.

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