- Fortune, Monday, June 5, 2006 11:30 AM
Search is getting better, writes
Fortune--as it should when companies like Google and Yahoo spend untold millions per month trying to make it better. Despite the dominance of the top two,
competition is fierce to get a piece of the Internet's biggest revenue driver.
Fortune takes a particularly close look at Barry Diller's Ask.com, the company formerly associated with that
funny-looking butler, and speaks very highly of its results: "Only Yahoo comes close to delivering value comparable to Ask.com," the article says. So what sets its apart? Unlike Google, Yahoo, and
MSN, Ask gives you content before ads. It also shows previews of pages, and charts and graphs next to results, where appropriate. Instead of showing ads along its right-hand side, Ask provides tools
for more results. Jim Lanzone, Ask's CEO, believes that while Google and Yahoo focus on Wi-Fi, competition from Microsoft, and other things, Ask will continue to creep up in search share (it has 6
percent now)--and might one day eclipse them. Its mantra: "We're building a better car," says Lanzone. "The premise is, we'll make money through more searches rather than more money per search." Ask
uses the technology of Teoma, a Web search firm that AskJeeves (as it was formerly known) bought the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Teoma groups sites by topic, rather than by the number of times a page
containing the terms is linked to--that's why it can find "ozone layer" results for a "global warming" query.
Read the whole story at Fortune »
