When it comes to search engines, Google is the king of the mountain. Other big names in the search business are Yahoo and Bing which are essentially the same now after Microsoft and Yahoo Inc decided to join forces earlier this year. There are other search engines though and of these minor outfits, Ask.com is probably the most popular.
It started out as Ask Jeeves which aimed to offer answers to questions asked. Apart from the question and answer part of the search system, they also give out result base on keyword searches. This is not enough though to take a significant amount of users from Yahoo or Google. Still, Ask.com is still trying to gain ground on the big three. In order to make that possible, Ask.com recently came up with the idea to retrace its roots by bringing back the question and answer feature.
According to industry experts, Ask.com needs a large and loyal community which will add content to their database of questions and answers. The more people they have posting and answering questions, the more data they would have to offer to searchers. On the other hand, if only a few people started creating content for Ask.com’s knowledge database, they would be forced to either hire people who would do that or just continue with their keyword base search system.
If this move by Ask.com though proves to be successful, industry experts are expecting to see a trend that could continue. Many sites would look into employing the same tactics. This is all speculation at this point. Still, for online businessmen, it should be something to keep in mind. If the number of people using Ask.com suddenly shoots up, it should be the duty of your SEO consultant or yourself to come up with a good SEO campaign for higher rankings on Ask.com.
We are still to see if Ask.com’s return to its roots would make it a tougher competition for major search engines. They have a steep mountain to climb before they can be of any threat to the big three search engines. But the move to try something new shows that they are at least not yet giving up.
