Thursday, May 15, 2008

Ask.com's Challenge: Competing With Free

Ask.com has acquired Lexico, the company that owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and several other reference material properties.

Many people had written off Ask when it laid off 8 percent of its staff earlier this year. This acquisition shows a new focus on answering natural language questions posed by its core demographic -- women over 30.

That's not a bad strategy to differentiate itself from Google and the other engiens except for one fact -- Google already does a pretty good job at this by indexing Wikipedia.org.

It's hard to compete with Wikipedia's ad-free service. it's huge, continues to improve, and Google's algorithm rates it within the first few results. Ask has a chance in this niche, but it's hard to compete with Google's ad network and Wikipedia's comprehensive service.

By John Gartner at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

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