The news marks the end of an era. IAC's Barry Diller told Bloomberg that it was a concession to the incredible search power of Google and company execs say they intend on shifting the product to the social Q&A it unveiled this Summer. That's another field that's already crowded with competitors. The passage of Ask as search marks the end of a number of interesting experiments.

Ask was always a search ground-breaker, but for some reason it never caught on. Ask instituted a site preview feature similar, if slower and less smart than what Google announced today, in 2006. In 2007 Ask broke new ground on data privacy with the launch of the Ask Search Eraser. The company did music previews before Google, and more.

Unfortunately, the Ask search results never seemed as good as Google's. The company also didn't have the same kind of browser deals, promotional juice thanks to AdWords or cross-marketing from the wonderful email service Gmail.

Here are some of the things Ask has done well over the years:

• Blog Search

  Ask.com blog search used to be the best because it let you sort by popularity, as defined by subscriber numbers in Bloglines, once the market-leading RSS reader. Blog search is gone now and Bloglines was sold to an advertising company on the eve of being shuttered.

  For some reason, the prospect of subscribing to and searching for blogs has been widely rejected in favor of the ease and scale of Twitter and Facebook. It's sad.




• Search Facts

  Ask has long offered semantically-informed search results snippets at the top of the results page, something Google started doing much later. For whatever reason, that just didn't move people enough to get them to use it regularly.



• Maps and Voice

  Ask Maps has always been a viable alternative to Google Maps, for end-users. The inclusion of walking directions and search by voice are strong features, presumably with unclear futures now.

May you rest in peace, Ask.com. You fought a good fight.

Going Back to Ask.com's Roots

As Tony Gentile, Ask.com's senior vice president for product management told us earlier today, there used to be a clear mismatch between people's impression of Ask and the service's actual focus. While most users still think of Ask.com as a search engine that focuses on answering natural language queries, the company had actually shifted its focus to becoming a regular search engine. As Gentile told us, "search didn't work out so well" for the company and given that search isn't what Ask.com is known for, it only makes sense for the company to get back to its roots. Ask.com began to switch its focus back to Q&A last year. Today, 60% of queries on the site already include some form of immediate, authoritative answer to the user's question. Ask.com gets these answers from its partners, as well as through indexing and ranking other Q&A sites and examining them for signals that indicate that an answer is trustworthy. According to Ask.com's own metrics, it now hosts the world's largest Q&A database with over 500 million questions and answers indexed.

Now, with its new Q&A product, Ask.com can also begin to tackle the 40% of questions that it currently can't answer. The Q&A service asks users to create a profile and select areas that they feel comfortable answering questions about. Just like Aardvark, which Google acquired earlier this year, Ask.com first tries to route questions to users who indicated an interest in a relevant topic. After this, the question will also appear on the general Q&A site, where any user can browse and answer questions. Users can vote answers up and down and leave additional comments, too.

Over time, the service's routing algorithm learns what kinds of questions certain users are able to answer (and answer well). Notifications about new questions and answers arrive by email and through a prominent message on Ask.com's website.

In the near future, the company also plans to offer mobile apps and connections to social networks.

Can it Scale?

With Aardvark, Quora and a number of similar products, the market for Q&A services is definitely heating up right now. Unlike most of these startups, however, Ask.com is able to build on its existing community and millions of monthly visitors. Overall, Ask.com's Q&A service already feels like a very mature product, though it remains to be seen how well the company manages to scale it up from its current internal tester community.

Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise.

Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it's worth noting that even though Bing's important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn't really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site.

Says Ask spokesperson Nicholas Graham, "Health and reference are already two of our strongest verticals. It makes sense for Ask to team up with Komen and increase awareness amongst our 50 million monthly visitors."

According to the American Cancer Society, there are about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States and women have a 1 in 8 chance of developing invasive breast cancer. While there are a number of breast cancer-related corporate partnerships, only a few are fully embraced by health advocates. In recent years, environmental health organizations have formed the Think Before You Pink campaign as a backlash movement against companies that work on pink ribbon campaigns but manufacture products linked to the disease. Because Ask specializes in delivering information to its consumers, a public information campaign on breast cancer seems like a great fit.

Says Graham, "When you engage a community of users, the service becomes more robust. It makes a positve difference in the online and offline world." To change your skins and support Komen for the Cure visit the Ask Skins gallery.

Unfortunately, despite these innovations, people stuck with Google. It seems that googling has more to do with habit than anything else these days - being innovative doesn't necessarily translate into users when it comes to search.

That's why back in March of this year, Ask.com had to cut 8% of their staff (about 40 jobs) and began the process of restructuring their company. At the time, the word was that Ask.com would return their focus to their core audience of middle-American predominantly female users. Soon after, Ask.com's spokesperson, Nicholas Graham came out to say that information was just "plain wrong." The truth was somewhere in the middle - yes, Ask.com would be trying to focus on what their (mostly female) audience needed, but they weren't by any means turning into a women's site. "We know that a sizable group of our core user base is women, and we know they come to us for a certain kind of search: to get answers, often in areas of reference, health and entertainment," said Graham.

Those answers are exactly what Ask.com is trying to focus on now. According to a Search Engine Watch article, Ask's internal research showed that searchers looking for answers came to Ask.com three times more often than they went to other search sites, so Ask.com's plan to focus on offering easy answers makes sense.

Ask.com's Progress

Here we are, nearly 5 months later, wondering how Ask.com's big plan is coming along thus far. As it turns out, the company seems to be pretty much on track.

To return their focus to providing just answers, Ask had to dump some other initiatives that weren't paying off. Only last week, for example, we heard the news that Ask.com had decided to forgo their own mapping service and partner up with Microsoft instead. (No more walking directions!) Using the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform saves Ask.com money on both the infrastructure as well as letting them save on the cost of the frequent imagery updates and photo acquisitions required to maintain a competitive mapping service.

To become more visible, Ask.com has formed another partnership, this time, with Opera. Yesterday, it was reported that Ask has partnered up with the small-but-growing web browser to be included in the search bar as one of the drop-down choices for search engines.

But of course the big news came on Thursday, when it was announced that Ask.com had completed their acquisition of the Lexico Publishing Group, which owned Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com - a deal that is said to increase their unique monthly users by 11% to 145 million.

All these recent moves speak to Ask.com's decision to return to their core focus: answers. Instead of wasting money trying to be everything to everybody, they've outsourced the expensive of running a mapping portal and have acquired a company whose sites can help provide those short-and-sweet answers to some of the most common search queries. The only question that remains is whether these changes will be enough to give Ask.com a large enough piece of the search pie to keep their company sustainable.

At this time last year Google was at 64% and MSN was at 9%. Momentum remains with Google, but is that momentum inevitable? Could things change? We've written about three ways that it could.

Some have argued that Google's approach to search is outdated and slow to change. Apparently it's working just fine for them today, but there's a world of opportunities for other innovators to come up with a better search experience. We wrote about this situation in our recent post titled "How Vulnerable is Google in Search?"

Hitwise tracks 46 other search engines as well, which added up for a combined 1.7% of searches last month. 46 alternative search engines is like a week's work for our network blog AltSearchEgines, check it out if you'd like to learn about the rest of the industry, including some that may become the challengers of the future.

Semantic Web

Yahoo! is #2 today, but is taking the lead in support for standards based microformats and semantic web indexing. Yahoo! announced that it would index semantic markup three weeks ago. Since semantic markup could enable improvements in search quality by orders of magnitude, this could be a turning point for Google and Yahoo!

As we explained when that announcement was made:

Today, a web service might work very hard to scour the internet to discover all the book reviews written on various sites, by friends of mine, who live in Europe. That would be so hard that no one would probably try it. The suite of technologies Yahoo! is moving to support will make such searches trivial. Once publishers start including things like hReview, FOAF and geoRSS in their content then Yahoo!, and other sites leveraging Yahoo! search results, will be able to ask easily what it is we want to do with those book reviews. Say hello to a new level of innovation.

We'd like to get an update on the Yahoo! semantic indexing announcement, though, and presumably this is the kind of thing that Google will do soon as well.

Privacy Backlash

As Google grows continually stronger and more knowledgeable, the importance of the social contract between the company and its customers becomes increasingly more important. Google has not been as good as it needs to be about taking clear steps to guarantee security and prevent misuse of user data - including its own misuse of that data!

We wrote in February about how Microsoft's new levels of engagement with oppenness and data portability could offer an avenue to challenge Google, but few of our readers agreed in comments. You know what they say, though - if your mouth gets washed out with soap, you may be saying something important!

It may not be Microsoft that challenges Google, but it certainly seems possible that users will draw the line somewhere and look to limit Google's omniscience.

Perhaps not, though. Perhaps Google's search dominance will continue to grow and grow, month over month, year over year. Someday, if you want to know about your genetic propensity for a particular disease, you'll just as the Google. If you want to know what your kids are doing at home while you're away, you'll just ask the Google. Certainly today when we want to know what's on the web, a clear majority of us just ask the Google.