Ask.com (you know, that other search site) relaunched itself yesterday with lots of fanfare (and much rejoicing, yay!), crowing about its new design, new algorithms and customizable home page.
In combing the official press release, the word “mobile” doesn’t appear once.
Does Ask.com not care about the growing importance of mobile search?
What struck me as strange is that one of the new features of the Ask.com portal is Location-Based Results:
Ask3D now offers Smart Answer search results based on a person’s location. When people use Ask3D to search for “Starbucks,” they will see the locations nearest to them. When searching for “Gwen Stefani,” Ask3D lets people know when she is performing locally.
Even in this paragraph, Ask.com does not reference mobile devices. We can only assume that the LBS are relative to the location of the PC performing the search, not a mobile phone.
With all the noise Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have made about their mobile search plans in the last few months, I find Ask’s lack of a mobile plan to be puzzling.
Maybe Ask.com isn’t interested in this part of the business? Maybe that’s why Ask is the 5th-ranked mobile search engine, with just 5.1% of the market (compared to Google’s 49.7%).
Just for the hell of it, I fired up the browser on my mobile phone and went to Ask.com. The WAP version of Ask.com looks eerily similar to Google and Yahoo!’s mobile search pages.
I performed a search for “Mesa Boogie” (what can I say, I am a tube amp junkie) and was rewarded with a solid number of results.
Then I went to Ask.com on my laptop computer and performed the same search (The interface is nice, by the way. Less utilitarian and more stylized that Google’s). The results of the search were exactly the same.
Then I did the same set of searches on Google’s mobile and standard versions. The top results were the same, even down to the sponsored results.
Ask.com provided some interesting additional bits of into, though, including links to some of Mesa Boogie’s competitors, dealers and even one of Mesa Boogie’s most well-known endorsers. These additional items were also available on the mobile search.
The mobile interface may not be as slick as its new homepage but Ask.com was just as useful of my mobile device as Google or Yahoo!.
So why isn’t Ask.com pushing its mobile services?
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