Search engine Ask.com is putting a new strategy with a reduction of its work force by 8%, about 40 jobs. Ask will focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.
“The company found that about 65 percent of its user base are women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast,” Ask’s CEO Jim Safka said.
Ask.com was formerly Ask Jeeves, Inc. The company was founded in 1996 in Berkeley, California. When it started out, Ask positioned itself as a search engine that could spit out answers to requests that were posed as natural-language questions instead of being entered as a string of loosely related words.
In Sept. 2001, Ask Jeeves acquired Teoma technologies, the algorithmic technology that is at the core of the Ask search engine.
In July 2005, Ask Jeeves, Inc. became a wholly-owned business of mega-corporation IAC/InterActiveCorp.
In February 2006, Ask Jeeves relaunched as Ask.com, retiring the Jeeves butler mascot.
Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said Ask’s new strategy could help boost the company’s profits because married women - particularly mothers - dictate many household spending decisions, making them a prime advertising target.
“It’s a smart move,” she said. “I still think Ask has great technology, but it’s just really hard to fight against Google.”
