With Ask.com cutting jobs and realigning its strategy, it seems the "little search engine that could" has thrown in the towel, transforming and re-branding itself into a women's site (ivillage.com?), chock full of Rachel Ray and Tyra Banks =P Very similar to the female-targeted shows on daytime television ....
Hmm, it seems as if Yahoo! has already beat y'all there w/ Food, OMG, Health, etc. I reckon becoming a media company will be challenging for the Ask.com team. Good luck, fellas.
The Ask.com transformation also confirms that the search engine battle is over. Google and Yahoo! are the only real winners, brands accepted and embraced by consumers as trustworthy and reliable. And that is also why Microsoft wants Yahoo! sooooo bad; they can't gain ground via traditional means and the only way in is to pay, and pay big.
The only way to beat Google and search is to invent a better means to find, traverse the wrangled and unstructured interwebs. Right now, there's no better way, because of its simplicity—think 'enter a keyword'.
Buh-bye.Labels: google, microsoft, search, yahoo
