SEO Blog

The shock has worn off. To be honest, it didn’t last as long as I’d hoped it would. The truth is, Ask’s death doesn’t make much of a material difference to Metamend or any other SEO firm for that matter. We might have been very good friends but this is a business environment after all.

We never really did a lot of business on Ask. Our clients haven’t considered their placement on Ask critical and, for the most part, neither have we. Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft have always driven far larger numbers of website visitors, making Ask a fourth-place second thought sort of address. For most of us, Ask never really mattered, at least not in a financial sense.

Nevertheless, most people in the search marketing community literally loved Ask.com/. We loved former CEO Jim Lanzone. We loved evangelist Gary Price. We loved hanging out with Patrick Crisp and the hilarious characters from the PR department.

Most of all, we loved what Ask had become and we watched as other search engines innovated on Ask’s ideas. Ask inspired all of us. That’s why it was included in the “Big4″, even though its market-share was consistently lower than AOL’s. The emotional outpouring of Ask obits is indicitive of how much the SEO community loved what was “the little engine that should”. Here are seven reasons we’ll miss Ask:

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde, 1892

The very best search engine on the Internet died today. Early this afternoon, Ask.com announced the layoff of 40-key employees and a radical shift in its focus and development. The property is still active but, if new CEO Jim Safka’s comments to the Wall St. Journal are any indication, the search engine itself is, as of today, lifeless.

“Mr. Safka outlined a new strategy for the search engine that aims to increase the loyalty of its core customers. Instead of trying to build products that would appeal to “the digerati” or “West Coast elite,” as Ask had been, he wants to focus Ask on meeting the needs of its core audience, predominantly women who use the site to ask questions about topics like entertainment and health. To do that, he says the company will launch new products and enhance its technology through efforts like pulling in more community-generated answers.” source: WSJ.com

Search Engine Journal is reporting that IAC has announced today that Jim Lanzone was stepping down as CEO of Ask.com and being replaced by IAC insider Jim Safka. Lanzone is credited with the successful transformation of failing property AskJeeves into what many regard as the web’s best search engine, Ask.com.

Loren Baker notes that Safka was, “… CEO of Match.com from 2004 to 2006 before becoming the CEO of Primal Ventures, the venture incubating branch of IAC.”

Lanzone will move to join the Entrepreneur in Residence program at Redpoint Ventures, a Venture Capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, Shanghai and Los Angeles. Through this program, Redpoint fosters entrepreneurs with proven track records. According to their E-i-R page, “Redpoint has a successful history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs through its Entrepreneur-in-Residence program. By teaming up early on, we accelerate the time it takes to identify a large market opportunity and create a great company to go after it.”

Jim Lanzone is a figure who is well liked and well regarded by the search engine optimization community. His “open-door” policy extended to anyone with a good question or important insights and Lanzone was known for reaching out to SEOs through blog comments and personal emails.

Former US Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil (D-WA) once quipped, “All politics are local.” He was referring to the necessity of elected politicians to listen to and work on behalf of the ultimate assessors of their past and future success, their constituents. When it came down to choosing options, the smart politician always chooses the ones that favour the folks who elected him.

Similarly, there is a philosophy in search marketing circles that states “All search is local”, or to be more precise, most product and services searches are local. Search users use search when looking for something they want to purchase or something they require professional help with. Most of the answers they seek can be found within five to twenty miles of their homes.

Since people have been buying local products and accessing nearby services for countless generations, that fact is not lost the vast majority of consumer searchers. The difference is search is rapidly replacing traditional marketing sources such as telephone directories, newspaper ads, television and even junk-mail in informing locals about local products and services.