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, with just under a 4 percent share of the search market in the US. However, in an email to Danny, Safka described a number of achievements, including growing traction for Ask’s vertical strategy and success with the return of Jeeves the butler in the UK.

In early January, 2008 Safka replaced then Ask CEO Jim Lanzone, who had presided over the innovative “Ask 3D” relaunch. Lanzone became CEO of Ask in April, 2006 himself replacing Steve Berkowitz who went to Microsoft. (Berkowitz is currently CEO at Move.com.)

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.”

Ask 3D was certainly more daring in most respects than Google’s Universal Search, but arguably the core relevance of search results on Ask doesn’t match Google. Diller’s statement about Google not being dominant forever is a kind of bland truism about all market leaders.

On to Yahoo and Microsoft. On the All Things D blog itself there’s a fairly extensive summary of Walter Mossberg’s interview with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker. Mossberg was very pointed in his questions about Yahoo’s strategy, its potential relationship with Google, and the failed Microsoft merger. It appears to have been a frank discussion with no new revelations about strategy.

Yang compares the failed Microsoft bid to the breakup of a high-school romance: “It’s like when you break up with your girlfriend in high school. It very quickly becomes he-said/she-said. I don’t want to look back. But I think we both understand that there is a tremendous amount of power in a combination like the one Microsoft proposed.”

Yang also says, “I’m the best person to run Yahoo.” He and Decker also apparently make lots of general statements and claims about exciting future plans and products, but with few specifics other than what’s already been announced elsewhere.

Yang apparently played golf with Steve Ballmer (his ex-girlfriend?) over the weekend, according to the Wall Street Journal, but no deal emerged. The full buyout is off the table and what they apparently discussed is Microsoft’s current interest in acquiring the search/search advertising business.

News Corp. Chairman (and owner of All Things D parent Dow Jones) Rupert Murdoch was also in the hot seat at the conference (coverage also on Barrons). He said that he was impressed that Yahoo held off Microsoft’s charge but also expressed that he doesn’t see the company succeeding in search or appeasing shareholders with a Google deal. He also dismissed the Carl Icahn proxy challenge to Yahoo’s board, saying that it “wasn’t serious.” As a practical matter, Microsoft’s abandonment of its takeover quest for Yahoo appears to thwart Icahn’s ultimate ambition to restart the merger discussions.

The Murdoch interview appears to have been the most interesting and candid and also the most free-ranging. It ran the gamut from the state of the US newspaper industry to online social networking, video distribution, search, and the US presidential election (the traditional conservative Murdoch appears to be leaning toward Obama).

All Things D’s Kara Swisher asked, “How do you look at Google right now?” Murdoch responds, “We love them . . . We think they’re fantastic, the greatest company in America. But you don’t want anyone to be a monopoly.”

Finally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and new (ex-Googler) COO Sheryl Sandberg took the stage to discuss the state of all things Facebook (summarized by Barrons). Facebook has been poaching a steady stream of Google employees and has become something of a “second front” for Google, with Microsoft being the primary one. Yet, Zuckerberg’s tone was conciliatory: “I’d like to work with them on something.”

Hmmm . . . “something.”

For her part, Sandberg had nice things to say about Microsoft. Barron’s paraphrases her: coming from Google, you don’t spend a lot of time at Microsoft; it’s a good partnership; it will continue to be important. Most of the discussion about Facebook’s business model and future advertising plans was about brand/display and trying to further innovate in those areas following the Beacon debacle.

It remains a mystery, however, that the company doesn’t implement web search and related monetization on its site (see Microsoft’s Facebook Ad Deal Doesn’t Include Search). Perhaps that was the “something” that Zuckerberg was alluding to with Google. We’ll see.

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. No more appealing to the "West Coast elite" or "digerati," you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you’re dead. You’re about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon.

It’s OK. It hurts, but we both know it’s for the best. I know what you’re thinking. I can hear you explaining it to me, over and over. IAC chief Barry Diller bought Ask.com back in 2005, gave both Steve Berkowitz and then Jim Lanzone time to try and pull searchers in by being more innovative than Google, and that didn’t work. You tried. But now, it has to be out with the search product CEO and in with something new.

But listen, I say. Ask held its own against the combined weight of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. That was a success, it really was. And Ask WAS innovating. Among the major search engines, it was the only one with something really different, really unique going on. And as we’re about to move into a likely Google-Microsoft duopoly, perhaps Ask’s day was about to come.

Sigh. I know, I know. Innovation is all fine, but why bother if you believe you’ll never grow share? Why not shut everything down that’s new, fresh, and expensive to do and just get the most money off the basic traffic you know won’t go away.

I talked about this yesterday on the Daily SearchCast, before you announced the layoffs. That’s because Ask’s departure from being a strong, clear, independent voice in search was clearly coming. We saw the rumor about dumping your crawling technology. Yes, we’ve seen the denial of this and the further denial. But Barry, new CEO Jim Sacka, whomever is left — we don’t believe you. We know you’re just going to hand it all over to Google. C’mon, it’s obvious. You don’t have any heart left in the new organization to be running your own tech. You certainly don’t show it from the top. About the only reason I can see for saying you want to keep the tech is that perhaps you hope someone will still see it as valuable, so you can sell it.

Someone should. I’ll come back to that, when we play the What If part of this obituary. But let’s look ahead. You’ve decided that Ask is going to be reconfigured to appeal to women. I guess I missed the memo where women said they somehow needed a search engine that was different for them. What are you considering? Pink and lots of flowers? A recipe search? Maybe a section for working moms? Any more stereotypes you think might fly? Hey, why don’t you change CEOs again and put an actual woman in charge of the company that wants to build a search engine for women. That might be a good marketing move. Maybe bring back Jeeves the butler (as we’ve all been expecting), but this time as a shirtless beefcake.

You go, girl. You go after the women, but after just doing a panel asking teenagers about search – and hearing they see absolutely no reason for a search engine for teenagers — I’m puzzled about why women somehow need to have something aimed at them.

I like Forrester analyst Charlene Li — and she’s a woman to boot — but I hope you’re not believing her when she told the AP:

Li predicted many married women and mothers will be thrilled to have a search engine focusing on their interests. "It’s not so much that these women have simple questions," she said. "It’s just that they are so busy that they need fast answers."

Are you kidding me? Do you know anyone that wants to sit around and not get fast answers? What, men have more time because we occupy ourselves farting and picking our noses until the search results come up?

Reassure yourself that having a slightly higher share of women than other search engines (you say 65%; Hitwise tells us 58%) is going to pay off in this way. Sure, I know you can dismiss me as one of those West Coast elite digerati that you "stumbled" in trying to appeal to, as you told the Wall Street Journal. But I’ve also been watching this space for nearly twelve years. A crying need for "women search" has never come up. Good luck with that.

Oh, but wait. You’re going back to your roots as well, trying to get question answering going. Rather than have editors provide answers to questions, you’ll let searchers — women — flock to post.

Well, it could work. I mean, you’re not going to be a search engine like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft if you do that, so you’re staying in the deadpool. But there could be a business there. Yahoo Answers has certainly had success with taking questions from people of both genders. But just a little cold water – Microsoft’s Live QnA doesn’t appear to have ramped up to match Yahoo Answers in popularity, and Google shuttered Google Answers back in 2006 and is only considering it for select countries. But maybe Ask knows better.

FYI, you did have a service that let people ask questions. It was called Ask AnswerPoint, and the URL remains here (and here’s how it used to look). You ran it from 2000 through May 2002. That guy you fired — Jim Lanzone — he saw speed as a big issue in why it never took off. People didn’t want to wait for answers (which conflicts with having a search engine for all those busy women).

Let’s skip past the whole "we’re after the women" or "we’re going to answer questions" stuff. Let’s get to the dirty truth here. As a network, your biggest success has been driving traffic off toolbars. Get your Zwinky or your Smileys or your cursors and many other things from Fun Web Products. That’s apparently been your growth driver, people installing this stuff and ending up with Ask as a default search engine as a result.

Just remember, Ask has a really bad history here. At one point in 2005, Microsoft was even tagging MyWebSearch as a "Toolbar Browser Hijacker." Others flagged your products, as well. Jim Lanzone — yeah, him again — did a great job in trying to redeem Ask from that past history.

Well, it’s clear what’s going to happen. You’re going to embrace the toolbar stuff again. I have no doubt about that. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if (sadly) you pick up a point or two of share in doing it. But it’s not going to last. Give me a call in a few years and tell me if I’m wrong. But I don’t think it’s going to last because you don’t build a brand by sneaking it up on people.

You’re also planning to do the giveaway thing. Well, that certainly gave Microsoft a spike last year, but it didn’t keep. Microsoft is trying it again, and as long as you keep plugging away, that might give you some temporary boosts.

But really, spin on new ideas and new plans aside, I deadpool you because you’ve seen terminal velocity approach and decided to embrace it, rather than fight it.

Terminal velocity? You know, when someone or something is falling through the air, it reaches a speed where it can’t accelerate any further. The same thing happens with old search engines. Actually, maybe it’s reverse terminal velocity. You lose share and slip lower and lower until things stabilize. You’re no longer a major search engine. You’ve got maybe a few tenths of a share. But by doing absolutely no work, you hold on to that share — you reach a steady state. Your descent doesn’t get any worse.

Let’s take some past brands to understand this. AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Excite, Go, iWon, WebCrawler. These were all major search engines that pulled back from doing search on their own. But you know, hundreds of thousands of links still point at them. And that means they still get plenty of people who don’t know better going to them, doing searches.

I see this all the time in librarian web sites that haven’t been maintained, a list of search engines from years ago that still get referred to. Heck, search for search engine on Google, and you get AltaVista first. C’mon Google, rip AltaVista out of there (and hey, Mahalo gets it right by including Search Engine Land in the top results!). But AltaVista survives, gets searches, and Yahoo still earns money off of it.

Probably no search company understands terminal velocity better than Ask. They either own or power search for several of the old brands (Excite, iWon, and WebCrawler). They know that these properties are worth about a percentage point or more in search share in the US without having to lift a finger.

So, dump development on Ask as a competitor against the big three. Really, I do understand. To play the What If game, I do think Ask’s time might have been coming. Aside from brand, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are largely similar to each other. Ask was doing new stuff, and even Google was looking and starting to copy. I don’t know who exactly coined the phrase "going beyond 10 blue links," but I know the guy who popularized it — Jim Lanzone. And make no mistake, Jim failed to dramatically move Ask in the way that many might have been hoping for. But he understood search. He has many friends in the industry, not because he’s a nice guy, but because he was passionate about improving the search experience. Search is hurt by his departure, but his departure was only the harbinger that Ask itself would be leaving the stage.

I heard all the major search engines on our Generation Next panel at SMX West last week use that phrase: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Jim’s phrase. The Ask rep didn’t use it because the Ask rep pulled out at the last minute. The Ask rep probably will never use it in the future, because Ask just isn’t competing with the other three anymore. Ask is out of the game, perhaps at exactly the right time when it should be ready to run onto the field if Microhoo happens.

I won’t cry for you much, Ask. I know you’re in a different place now. I know what makes sense to me and many others doesn’t make sense for you. But I hope you’ll understand when I and the many others you’ve dismissed as the "digerati" aren’t counting you in the search game any longer. That’s because we know in our hearts you’re gone, even if you protest that it’s not so.

NOTE: I left off reading reactions from others until I finished my own thoughts above. Now that I’ve done that, I’ve had a look around. Readers should definitely check out Barry Schwartz’s Search Community Reaction to Ask.com New Search Strategy. I especially loved this part:

Diller pulls the soul out of Ask.com by removing Lanzone, he then pulls the smarts out of Ask.com by removing Gary Price and then pulls the will out of Ask.com by cutting 8% of the team.

Then there’s Lisa Barone, in Goodbye Ask.com: A Brand Evangelist Hangs It Up:

I’m heartbroken over the loss of an engine I loved and intensely angry at Barry Diller, the man who never understood the gem he had in his hand, and in return, threw it away when it wasn’t making money as fast as he wanted it to. This was a decision based on money, not about users, not about search, not about anything other than Barry Diller’s bottom line. This was not Ask’s choice. This was forced upon them and I think that’s important to remember….

If I could ask Barry Diller for one thing, it’d be this: Now that you’ve dismembered Ask and its heart, be man enough to just kill it once and for all. Don’t tell me that you’re “restructuring” or “refocusing” or “realigning”. That’s even more insulting than what you’ve already done.

Lisa, by the way, is not only a West Coast elite digerati. She’s also a woman that the supposed new search engine will shift to appeal to. But because she’s not an idiot, she understands that the "restructuring" talk is just that, talk for a break-up she didn’t want to have and a lost opportunity she doesn’t want to contemplate.

From long-time search observer Tara Calishain:

SF Gate refers to Ask as an “also-ran” among search engines. Five years ago I would have agreed completely. Now, I don’t think so. Had this shift in focus happened five years ago, I would not have much cared. Now, I care very much. Ask in the last couple of years has come up with some great offerings. The mapping service. The packed-with-data-but-still-usable search results. The terrific page preview with statistics. AskEraser. And Bloglines. (Hopefully, Bloglines will go on.) So many great things — I’m sad and sorry that Ask isn’t staying in the game.

Finally, ironically, where Barry Diller’s business motives are getting most of the blame, Diller himself might lose control of Ask-ower IAC by next week.

AllThingD’s Kara Swisher does a wide ranging video interview with former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone. Among other things, Swisher and Lanzone discuss “the future of search” (at only the very highest level, however).

Lanzone discusses Ask3D and the general trend toward introducing more structured and multimedia content into search results, and the movement away from the proverbial “10 blue links.”

Regarding the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Lanzone says it will benefit smaller search players in the market. He asserts that Microsoft’s cash might be able to fund greater innovation at Yahoo rather than shutting down innovation as some have asserted (assuming the deal goes through).

Swisher asks Lanzone for his predictions for search five years out. Lanzone opines that social media will be more integrated into general search. He also says that 30-40 percent of search could move to mobile devices in five years, but downplays the idea of most of that content being local.

Back on the desktop, Lanzone sees more “guidance” being provided to users in the form of query refinement and options after the query is entered into the search box.

Swisher asks, as a final question, “What’s the most hyped thing you’re seeing out there?” Lanzone replies, “beyond social networks, virtual worlds.”

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both report on the legal battle for control of IAC’s board and thus the company itself. It’s not pretty, and IAC claims that it’s impeding the company’s ability to effectively operate.

The legal fight arguably prevents IAC from making any sort of overture (so to speak) toward Yahoo, although it’s a much smaller company ($7.4 billion vs. $38 billion). Another issue to consider is the potential impact on Ask.com of a post-Micro-Hoo search landscape.

Ask and AOL jockey back and forth for the number four and five positions in the search rankings. A combined Microsoft-Yahoo would be a solid number two, with a roughly 31 percent market share according to the most recent comScore data. Both Ask and AOL hover just below 5 percent.

Ask is a differentiated product that might grab more attention in a newly consolidated marketplace, depending on whether and how Microsoft and Yahoo search came together. There’s a potential opening there that Ask might hypothetically exploit. However, it’s unclear whether the company can and will.

IAC has indicated a willingness to market on behalf of Ask.com but not necessarily continue to invest in developing its technology — or at least at aggressive levels. The company’s internal troubles, forthcoming trial over control of the board, and arrival of potential new management (if Liberty Media succeeds in ousting IAC CEO Barry Diller) could go either way: putting a fresh focus on Ask with corresponding resources or treating it like a cash cow and milking it.

At number 23, Ask3D was named one of PC World’s “25 Most Innovative Products of the Year.” The site opined that Ask “melds comprehensive search results more coherently than competing universal searches do.” Ask saw the largest gains in consumer satisfaction in the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) vs. its search competitors. And there are some indications that Ask has also seen a bump in traffic from its 3D redesign, though reports from various metrics firms conflict on this point. Other PC World innovative products included Google Gears, the iPhone, and Amazon Kindle.

Ask.com is now displaying a clock showing the local time in relation to local searches. For example, search for san jose, ca, and you’ll see the local time there appearing in the right-hand column, like this:

Give it a try for your favorite city.

For the first time, Yahoo has beaten Google in the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The survey measures U.S. consumer satisfaction across a broad range of business and product categories including “e-business,” which covers search. The survey asks a statistically representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to a number of criteria, which produces an overall satisfaction score on a 100 point scale. The search/portal category has been rated since 2000. Until this year, Google has always lead the ASCI since the first year the index included it, in 2002.

Among the top engines, Ask saw the largest gains in satisfaction (5.6%) while Yahoo emerged as the overall winner, beating Google by a single point. But Yahoo and Google were trending in opposite directions, with Yahoo gaining and Google losing a roughly equivalent percentage (see below). AOL saw the biggest decline in satisfaction (-9.5%) of any of the big portals/engines.

It’s not entirely clear, based on the timing of the study, whether the jump in satisfaction for Ask is entirely attributable to the “Ask3D” redesign, but that’s the likely explanation according to Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results, which sponsors and interprets the ACSI e-business report.

Source: ACSI (2007)

The satisfaction data clearly don’t correlate with search market share. I asked Freed in this context why people should care and pay attention to the ACSI. Freed was confident that “search market share reflects past behavior. But the ACSI is predictive of future consumer behavior.” He said that historically it has been a very accurate gauge of future consumer behavior in other industries. He added that Google’s decline was a second dip in a row after a smaller decline last year.

Consumers in the survey are not asked to tell researchers why they’re rating a selected product or service the way they are, so they must interpret and draw inferences regarding why one engine may have received a satisfaction gain and another a loss. Freed believes that consumers were rating Yahoo overall and giving high marks to the home page redesign and the new mail beta client, among other positives. He argues that consumers want to see change and improvement and that Google has not kept pace with those expectations. In a piece of written analysis, Freed argues:

In fact, not much has changed for the average Google user in the last few years. The innovation and technology that Google originally brought to search was a giant leap ahead of the competition. However, Google is now taking only small steps that are undetected or ignored by the mass population of search users.

I challenged Freed that there were numerous changes at Google (e.g., in Maps, Universal Search) but he countered that consumers were either not aware of these changes or they were too incremental to gain much notice.

Regarding AOL’s decline, Freed attributed it largely to transition issues and the fact that AOL has been dogged by customer service problems surrounding cancellation of its dial-up ISP services. Freed adds (from his written analysis):

AOL is still having a hard time differentiating itself from the industry leaders. Its search function clearly loses to Google’s. Its portal is inferior to Yahoo’s. It competes with MSN in terms of offering fresh content and music, but MSN seems to be doing it better, at least bigger with concerts like Live Earth.

MSN/Live Search was basically flat year-over-year, with “nothing to truly set MSN apart from the rest of the field,” according to Freed.

There is the question of whether consumers were truly rating “apples to apples” in the case of the portals vs. Google and Ask. But if Freed is correct and these scores are predictive of future consumer loyalty and behavior, then we should see some shifting in search market share in the next 12-18 months. Regardless, it suggests Ask and Yahoo are on the right track and Google should see these data as an early warning sign and make some adjustments to avoid further declines — and potential market share losses — in the future.

This morning at 5 am US Pacific time there was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake in the Oakland, California hills where I live. Danny found the earthquake by doing a search on Ask simply for “earthquakes.” The example highlights the value of Ask 3D, the inclusion of more “vertical” structure in search results, and how the new Ask really shines in certain situations vs. the other engines.

Compare results:

• Ask

  

• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft Live Search
• AOL

Impressively, the correct result on Ask appears without using a geographic modifier, but there’s also a box to refine by geography within the body of the search results if the desired information isn’t present. On the other engines you could get to the same information but you’re at least a couple of clicks away from the SERPs.

Here’s our previous write up Ask 3D when it launched early last month.