The Internet Search Engine War Goes On

Today, Bloomberg reported that Ask.com has conceded its search business to its competitors. That means 130 engineers could go out of job (and we’re going to miss their work).

It’s expensive to crawl and index the web and currently no one does it better than Google and Bing. Both companies apparently have the financial muscles and expertise to stay in this game.

Even Yahoo, which used to be the world’s number one search engine, has “outsourced” its search functions to Microsoft’s Bing.

Ask.com’s President, Doug Leeds, said that Google has become too powerful to compete against and it doesn’t make any financial sense to clash head on. Google currently owns 65 percent of all U.S searches while Ask.com has less than 2 percent. The difference is indeed way too great.

Although one search engine is down, another one is raising up. Meet Blekko, a search engine which is totally unique from what the market has currently. Imagine having full control of what you want to search on the web, Blekko can help you with that. This is possible by adding slashtag, a smart tag added to your keywords which commands the search engine to reflect results that are more customized and relevant. For example, hitting “global warming /date” into the search bar gives you sites that are updated most recently. You can even add more than one slashtags, like “global warming /date /tech” to surface recent news only from tech blogs

Catch the explanation video below.

Even with Google gaining a strong foothold in this domain, the search engine war goes on. Bing will never give up and start-ups like Blekko offers creative search solution that is uniquely different from the giants. I guess it’s better this way. With competition, comes improvement and better search engines for us.