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Ask.com and Google's Impenetrable (For Now) Position
by Kevin Maney
Oct 06, 2008
Oct 06, 2008
Kevin Maney muses: What's it going to take to stop Google in search? It's not apparent right now.
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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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