Like a father disowning his own child IAC's Barry Diller seems to have all but written off the search engine he paid almost two billion dollars for a few short years ago (update: see Barry Diller statement below). According to TechCrunch, Diller told a conference audience (partial paraphrase) that today Ask had "no value." I don’t think Ask.com is going to gain search share; everyone copied us . . . Ask has no value inside of IAC, so why would it add value as a standalone site? That can't be correct because Ask contributes substantial revenue to the company's Media & Advertising divis [...]

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As Matt posted earlier this evening Ask is in beta on a new approach to search, or perhaps more accurately: a return to an earlier approach but with greater experience and sophistication. The IAC-owned company is returning, conceptually, to its origins as a question & answer engine, when human editors were involved. This has been in the works since last year when Ask was calling it "social search." The company is making a serious bet that "Q&A" can be a differentiator for Ask and provide new appeal for the engine, which has seen flat-to-modestly-declining traffic over the past two y [...]

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Ask.com CEO Jim Safka is leaving the company. He will become the head of Chegg, Inc., which rents textbooks to students online. The decision to leave is apparently Safka's, for personal reasons. Longtime IAC executive Scott Garell will take over as "President of Ask Networks." In its most recent earnings report, IAC's "media & advertising" business (which reflects search revenues) was off 22 percent compared with the same period a year ago. Ask's market share, as the WSJ article points out, has remained largely flat during Safka's time at the helm, [...]

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There's a ton of search-related news and intrigue coming out of the Dow Jones "All Things D" conference in Southern California. Let's start with the ridiculous remark from IAC's chief Barry Diller that "Google is irrelevant to us." That's only true if Diller doesn't care about search revenue. Google is essentially the source of that revenue for IAC. He also reportedly said, "I believe our product is in most respects better than Google," and that he thinks Google's dominance cannot last indefinitely in search: "At some point Google will not live ever after with 60 or 90 percent of market." A [...]

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Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You'd dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you're just for women, apparently. [...]

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