Ask.com Searches For Some Attention

Poor Ask.com. Nobody seems to have noticed that the IAC-owned search engine already had several of the features that its bigger competitors rolled out to acclaim last week. So, in a blog post, Ask.com’s vice president of technology tries to set the historical record straight. Keith Hogan first takes on Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which announced that it had boosted the sophistication of the “related search” suggestions that show up after a user makes a query. Hogan says that Ask.com has had that feature for “years.” Next up: Microsoft’s new “Instant answers” for Live Search. Hogan says Ask.com has been doing the same thing for “almost a decade.” In case his readers have not visited Ask.com lately, Hogan posts some Ask.com screenshots as evidence.

There’s a reason, of course, that Hogan has to go to such lengths to remind the world that Ask.com is not behind the times: Despite those once-avant-garde features, Ask.com hasn’t been able to persuade users to make the switch from Google or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) for that matter. Ask.com’s market share continues to hover around 4 percent, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). And in that, there’s a lesson for other search engines, like Microsoft, that are set to announce new features: The search market is not fair. Google’s dominance is so entrenched that even innovation by a competitor won’t necessarily cut into its market share. And if it does, Google can always take the competitor’s features and claim them as its own. Chances are Google — and not the competitor — will be heralded for being on the cutting edge.

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