I was talking to an executive at IAC and told him that to differentiate Ask.com and one of their other properties, IAC should better merge content with search.
Looks like MSFT beat them to it:
The memo, first obtained by Gigaom, details the company’s effort to build on MSN’s vision of delivering “relevant” and “social” content experiences, whatever that means. It is also merging, to some extent, the search and content teams, as “it’s imperative that we setup for blurring of the lines between Portal and Search to drive experiences that enable more seamless exploration of content across the search-browse continuum.”
One of Ask.com’s strong differentiation points is that parent company IAC has a lot of strong properties in the content space. Since these are all branded differently, users won’t think or care that it’s from the same parent, they should offer more direct links to pertinent content. Yes, this might reduce clicks to paid ads, but the goal should be to drive more search queries overall and improve relevance of results, first.
Why? A few reasons:
- Users in the real world are not represented by the vocal minority in Silicon Valley.
- Google’s uber neutral approach to content is a strength and a weakness and MSN is well served in exploiting all of the content across MSN properties.
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