Is Ask.com moving in on Google?

(2/12/07) -- Have you been on the Internet lately looking for information? "Search" is the number one activity on the net, and local search accounts for 10 percent of all queries. So an Oakland-based search engine has launched a new service aimed at connecting Web surfers to neighborhood business listings. It has dropped its cartoon mascot and is now going after Google.

Jeeves sits forever frozen outside his office.

Jim Lanzone, Ask.com CEO: "Yes, I'm the person responible for removing Jeeves from the site."

The English butler given the boot by Jim Lanzone, recently promoted to CEO of what is now known as Ask.com.

Formerly called AskJeeves, the site has undergone a transformation, changing its look, and more significantly to Internet watchers, its search technology.

Jim Lanzone: "Jeeves was associated with being for novices or being for questions, not as being a world class robust search engine which is what we've become."

It's a retooling made possible, in part, by IAC Interactive Corp., headed by media mogul Barry Diller. The conglomerate includes the Home Shopping Network, Match.com and Ticketmaster. IAC purchased AskJeeves in 2005. A year later, the butler was dropped.

The new site, Ask.com, has a new interface with specialized features. Down the side, suggestions to let you either expand or narrow your inquiry. On the main page, binoculars, patent pending technology that allows you to preview Web sites. But the biggest upgrade is what Lanzone refers to as the site's secret sauce -- software that conducts expert rank searches.

Jim Lanzone: "The expert ranked algorithm is at the core of our search technology and it works differently than any other search engine out there in that it breaks down the Web by topic before determining popularity. So we're not just trying to figure out what site is the most popular, we're trying to figure out what site is the expert on the topic."

Greg Sterling, Sterling Market Intelligence: "If the results produced by the search technology and the presentation of that, because that's part of what's going on, is different enough or better in the minds of many people, then they'll use it."

Internet analyst Greg Sterling says Ask.com's features make it attractive to what he calls power users -- sophisticated searchers who like bells and whistles. But he thinks it's Google's very simplicity that's made it a household name.

Greg Sterling: "It's the Internet equivalent of Coke. We know it, we drink it, we like it. They have to be sexier, more aggressive."

While Sterling sees Ask as the hungriest of the search engines, Google is still by far the biggest with a 45-percent share of all queries in the U.S.

Yahoo! and Microsoft share another big chunk of the pie, but just recently, Ask nudged out AOL for the number four spot. It's a bump that has tech columnists taking notice.

Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch Dow Jones: "In fact, it's growing 30 percent a month and that is equivalent to what Google is growing at."

Bambi Francisco, a financial columnist with Dow Jones, says Ask is chipping away at Yahoo! and MSN with the introduction of services like Ask X, a three-panel interface in testing and its newest service, Ask City, focused wholly on local search.

Jim Lanzone: "Ask City is actually four search engines in one. You can search for businesses or services so a plumber or a place to get your hair cut or a piano tuner. But you can also search for events."

Ask.city lets you find a restaraunt, read a review, make a reservation, buy tickets to a show, draw a map and send it to your date without leaving the page. One-stop searching that Greg Sterling says may eventually convince searchers to Ask before they Google.

Greg Sterling: "We can't imagine what the post-Google world looks like, but I can guarantee you that in five years things will be quite different than they are today."

Jim Lanzone: "We're not here to try to conquer the world or to be the world's richest company. We're trying to help you find things faster."

Ask.com has 30 million users a month and is in eight countries. A lot of money is on the line. Advertisers spend eight billion dollars online, that's still only four percent of total advertising.
Copyright 2007, ABC7/KGO-TV/DT.)

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