Los Angeles – IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s (NASD: IACI) Ask.com search engine
unit is laying off 130 employees, mostly engineers who had been working on the
company’s search engine — operation of which Ask.com has now farmed off to
third parties, Bloomberg reported.
Ask.com said it will cease development on
algorithmic web search; recent market research found the company claims less
than 2% of the total U.S. search market.
"This investment in independent
web search is not required by our strategy, nor is it required in the
marketplace," Ask.com president Doug Leeds wrote in a post on the
company’s blog.
"We have access to multiple third party structured and
unstructured data feeds that, when integrated, can provide a web search
experience on par with what we are able to produce internally, at much lower
costs." T
he company will now focus squarely on its questions-and-answers
Web service.
Related Links:
http://blog.ask.com/2010/11/askcom-update.html
http://tinyurl.com/32zk2pf
(Bloomberg)
