Ask.com is laying off about 130 engineers as it abandons its own technology for indexing and recommending Web sites.
The retreat announced Tuesday is aimed at cutting Ask.com’s costs while sharpening its focus on finding answers to search requests posed in the form of a question.
As part of that shift, Ask.com is closing its offices in Edison, New Jersey, and Hangzhou, China. That will reduce Ask.com’s work force of about 400 employees by nearly one-third and concentrate its remaining offices in the San Francisco Bay area.
Ask.com will rely on formulas developed by another search engine to process general-purpose requests that aren’t posed as questions. It didn’t disclose the identity of its new search provider, citing a confidentiality agreement.
Google Inc. has been delivering ads alongside Ask’s search results for nearly year.
Despite that business partnership, Ask.com had still been trying to build a better search engine than Google. That crusade intensified after IAC/InterActiveCorp bought Ask.com and its affiliated Web sites for $2.3 billion five years ago.
InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller was so impressed with Ask.com’s innovations in search that he believed it would be able to steadily whittle away at Google’s dominance of the lucrative search market.
But Ask.com has lost ground instead, leaving it with less than a 4 percent share of the U.S. search market.
Google became so adept and so popular that it’s difficult to justify pouring so much money into indexing tens of billions of Web pages and developing formulas into sifting through all the information, said Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds.
“Web search has turned into a commodity,” he said in an interview. “When we looked at what we were getting for all the money we were spending, we realized we could get the same thing from a third party for a lot less.”
A similar conclusion drove Yahoo Inc. to hire Microsoft Corp….