On the one hand I give credit to IAC’s Ask.com search engine for offering users AskEraser. On the other hand, I wonder, why bother?
Apart from the vocal minority consisting of tech writers and bloggers, who cares how much or how little search engines know and track your searches. I mean, unless you’re Al Qaeda, do you really care? In fact, if you are a normal person, chances are you want a search engine to track what you searched, no?
The main reason why this is somewhat asinine is that it’s not only search engines that track your path, so do ISPs, your email service, etc. The web is digital, get used to it, if you don’t like being tracked, go pick up a magazine or newspaper or tune in to TV, trust me, those guys don’t have a clue who their audience is…
See our previous coverage of Ask.com here. Related posts:
- Ask.com is now worth $3.15B
- Ask.com should stop wasting $100M in advertising and buy new search companies
- Maybe I (we) owe Ask.com an apology?
Tags: Ask.com, IAC, Search Wars|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Jul 19th
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July 21st, 2007 at 12:31 am
Look at Ask.com’s recent ads. Dancing women with swords? Musical theater? These things aren’t attractive to mainstream users. There is, however, a tech-savvy audience that is interested in these things. I’d bet that Ask.com’s research on their users indicates that this segment uses more media types than your typical Web user — thus the “everything on one page” results format that Ask uses. Adding on privacy features just attracts these users even more.
You value Ask.com on its small share of the large overall search market. Maybe Ask.com is hoping it can become more like BMW or Apple and own a large share of a small segment of the search market. What would its value be then? Probably higher, given better targeting for ads. And, heck, if you’re not going over a few percent share, you might as well make that a specific few percent, then you can track customer retention and manage customer acquisition much more precisely.