Ask.com announced (11/10/10) that it is laying off 130 engineers and ceding its effort at building and maintaining its own independent search technology (WSJ article). That really leaves Google and MSN/Bing as the only algorithmic search engine providers (sorry Mahalo, Wolfram Alpha and other search engines the average consumer doesn’t know about). For years many within the search engine industry had an internal respect for Ask’s technology, but it was never packaged well enough to catch on with the public (less than 4% U.S. market share in Sept. according to comScore). At this point search results have become a commodity, with only two real players it will be interesting to see how that pans out over time.
