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Ask Isn't Sweating The Competition

If you're in the search engine business and you don't work for Google, you probably think and talk about Google all the time anyway. If you're Yahoo, you wonder why Google still does a much better job monetizing its search traffic. If you're Microsoft, you're wondering how many more millions to invest to gain a few percentage points of market share. And if you're Ask.com, you might ask, is there a niche or something here for us?



Forbes talks to Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone about his company's place in search -- read: What's it like fighting a losing battle where you're constantly living under the collective shadow of your competitors? Lanzone says it doesn't bother him. That answer means that either Lanzone and his bosses at parent IAC/InterActiveCorp. have made peace with Ask's 5%-and-flat-or-declining market share -- or Ask is preparing some truly incredible new Google-killing technology.

Lanzone says it's both. The company that used to say that there's still an opportunity to beat Google is singing a different tune now. Search is such a huge market, Lanzone says, and rising tides lift all boats. "I'd rather have a small slice of a watermelon than a whole grape... Put another way, Mercedes doesn't sell as many cars as Ford, but which would you rather own?" Not sure if you could call Ask's results a Mercedes to Google's Ford, but still, some pundits swear IAC's search product is better than Google's. To that point, Ask's new ad campaign is all about its superior search algorithm, a word the company is trying to introduce into pop culture. If it can get people talking about and wondering what algorithms are, Ask may yet convince people to take its taste test.

Read the whole story at Forbes.com »

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