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In a surprising move, Ask.com has given up its effort to compete with the search engine giant Google (News - Alert).com. Instead, the site will be re-focused to serve a much narrower market: married women looking for help managing their lives.

 

When it first started out in 1996, Ask positioned itself as a search engine that could provide answers to requests that were posed as natural-language questions instead of being entered as a string of loosely related words, AP said a Wednesday report. Now, the company has decided to shift gears and enter another domain.

 

This decision comes after the company spent millions of dollars renovating its search engine and trying to compete with the likes of Google and MSN on lucrative search engine marketing, AP noted. Despite impressing the industry analysts, Ask.com nonetheless failed to make headway into the search marketing world. While the Google dominated the Internet search arena with an impressive 58.5 percent share, Ask.com managed to garner only 4.5 percent market share, despite its commendable efforts, AP said.  

 

“No matter what (Ask) did, it just wasn't enough to get people to leave Google,” the AP report quoted Chris Winfield, manager of search engine consulting firm 10e20, as saying. “This looks they are raising the white flag.”

 

Ask.com said the company is excited about its new goal and clear-cut audience, AP reported.  The company believes that this move will help boost its company's profits because married women—particularly mothers—dictate many household spending decisions, making them a prime advertising target.

 

With Ask.com exiting the search engine marketing domain, the few players who remain have more room to work with, AP said in its report. Google is the unquestioned and unchallenged leader, followed by Yahoo! and Microsoft (News - Alert). If Microsoft succeeds in its bid to buy Yahoo!, the field will become even more consolidated.