As IAC boss Barry Diller had his day in court yesterday, fighting to split up the various companies under IAC’s umbrella, including Ask.com, we thought it might be relevant to highlight a recent experience one of our managing partners, Peter Hershberg, had with actual Ask.com search results.

A search by Peter for “anatomy of the eye” on Google yesterday yielded an ad touting “the improved Ask.com.” Click the screenshot for a larger image:

Clicking the ad led him to an Ask.com results page that featured sponsored ads – two of which were about ears and pretty irrelevant. But even weirder was that the page yielded absolutely no organic results:

Instead, Ask.com said the search for “anatomy of the eye” did not match any Web results.

A search for the same phrase on Google today showed the same ad (see it here), and the Ask.com results page featured some organic listings this time. However, the organic listings were all below the fold, buried under ten sponsored results:

The search engine has recently stated its intentions to re-strategize (note: it’s not actually going to target moms; the AP was wrong) but it’s a safe bet that serving pages of only results is not part of that strategy…

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Advertising: Online, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.