Comments on: Ask Not What Women Want

By: coxy

coxy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:11:36 +0000

"'No matter what (Ask) did, it just wasn't enough to get people to leave Google,' said Chris Winfield, who runs a search engine consulting firm, 10e20."

Surely they haven't given this enough time? I like Ask as it is right now and didn't when it was Jeeves and question-based.

This is a bad move as far as I'm concerned.

By: coelho

coelho — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:22:59 +0000

Wonder if they dust off Jeeves and his platter as part of the retro-branding.

By: Abe

Abe — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:20:15 +0000

Echoing nmw, the girl I live with asks Google questions all the time. While searching for a vacation spot earlier this year, I would google “‘us virgin islands’ passport requirements ‘us citizen’”. She would enter ‘Do I need to have a valid passport to go to the us virgin islands if I am a US citizen?’

By: nmw

nmw — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:45:02 +0000

Abandoning hope re “one-size fits-all” search is a good idea!

And I think women do tend to “ask” (and LISTEN to answers) more than men do, so perhaps that might be a good “niche” to focus on(?) Also Ms. Li has some interesting ideas in the article too — but one has to wonder why ask.com would be in a better position to deliver answers than (e.g.) baby.com or pregnancy.com (or whatever).

By: saran

saran — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:41:23 +0000

This is good and bad.

Good – because small players should go with vertical search. It’s a marathon race, small players (in terms of market share) may not able to run for long. Ex: Netscape.

Bad – because no real competition from yahoo/Microsoft.

By: CraziestGadgets.com

CraziestGadgets.com — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:17:31 +0000

Ask is sort of like the wiki of search. Simple informative answers to simple questions. Which is exactly how they should be branding themselves. IAC, you can paypal me the $100,000 consulting fee right now- thanks.