News - Ask Jeeves to retire from the search market

[HEXUS]

Q&A service will live on, but search will be powered by a third party.

Read more.

[MSIC]

The associated browser toolbar, on the other hand, has been very successful and is reported to be responsible for Ask's recent growth in revenue.

I'm saddened to hear this.
Having a toolbar which auto-installs every time that someone wants to install some other application (flash, speedfan, anything by microsoft) is simple highjacking of the stupid, and only serves to annoy the educated.
It does 'Ask' no favours in the long term.

[Jay]

I used to use ask jeeves when it was aj.com but they just wheren't as good as google (still better than bing though)

[Fraz]

I'm saddened to hear this.
Having a toolbar which auto-installs every time that someone wants to install some other application (flash, speedfan, anything by microsoft) is simple highjacking of the stupid, and only serves to annoy the educated.
It does 'Ask' no favours in the long term.

Totally agree. In general I absolutely abhor the whole crap toolbar and pre-installed PC crapware "market". All it does is devalue the PC as a whole, and encourage more people towards Apple where that crap is not tolerated (as much).

[aidanjt]

I had to repair a machine not so long ago, the owner of said machine said their internet was slow.. vague, but the cause became quickly apparent as to why when I opened IE, and half of the screen was consumed by all manner of insane toolbars.

Toolbars should be banned, and Microsoft should be slapped upside the head for starting (and continuing) that crap.

[TheAnimus]

in fairness MS have put steps in ie9 to stop this 3rd party toolbar crap.

But at the same time I don't want to live in a windows phone 7 / Apple nazi style OS.

[aidanjt]

in fairness MS have put steps in ie9 to stop this 3rd party toolbar crap.

Good good. It's about time, too. Ya know, it's not even that they're there, but that almost all of the toolbars I've come across seem to just fill it up with useless crap for the sake of not having any blank space on the strip.

But at the same time I don't want to live in a windows phone 7 / Apple nazi style OS.

Likewise. Extensibility is a nice feature to have in a browser, some would even argue that it's a vital feature these days, even if I only have 1 installed, myself.

[Noxvayl]

... Market research attributes around 65 per cent of the US search-market, ...

To who? This sentence is empty

But at the same time I don't want to live in a windows phone 7 / Apple nazi style OS.

Seems like a pointless statement. I suspect the reference is to people not wanting "bloat-ware" but even then why navigate to the opposite end of the spectrum? I quite simply want all additional installation items to be OPT IN, not the other way around. It's invasive to force it onto to people not aware that those options are applications which are not part of what they are installing.



Back to the topic; searching is one hell of a difficult system to maintain, let alone progress with. I was surprised Ask Jeeves lasted so long.

[TheAnimus]

Good good. It's about time, too. Ya know, it's not even that they're there, but that almost all of the toolbars I've come across seem to just fill it up with useless crap for the sake of not having any blank space on the strip.

So far its quite nice how they've done it, it simply shows a screen showing how long each addin delayed startup by, not a bad solution to showing up how software is bad.

Seems like a pointless statement. I suspect the reference is to people not wanting "bloat-ware" but even then why navigate to the opposite end of the spectrum? I quite simply want all additional installation items to be OPT IN, not the other way around. It's invasive to force it onto to people not aware that those options are applications which are not part of what they are installing.

Actually when the biggest share of ask's traffic comes from a dieing industry its quite relevant.

The slightly off topic reference, is quite how much paper work I've got to do to get the bloody software onto the marketplace. Even then it could just be a fart app. This is the downside to having more regulation rather than just a free for all. It is also why I think its fair to compare. You can not change the default search on most mobile phones, its locked in. This must be hurting people like ask, who afterall have had a feature for some 4 years which google just got round to having this week.

Many are saying the future is mobile searching, I suppose that could be right, myself I'll make a few hundred googles/bings/site searches a day, mostly along the lines of SDK lookup stuff, stackoverflow discussions. But when I'm mobile its a place to eat/drink/buy. It must be the most profitable searches I do on my mobile (also where my location is there, and I often click through straight to the vendor phone number!).

[Noxvayl]

Gone quite a bit further than I had put forward in my post, guess inferences can't be stopped.

My statement was off topic, I know, but it had very little to do with search market share, competition and regulations... I was merely pointing out that I felt raising more problems, loosely related to the topic, was not a sensible way to think about issues. Then I put forward what I felt was a healthy approach to problems.

By The Way: I like the edit to the article, I know I can be pedantic with grammar but it's nice to read a clear, concise article