Ask.com out of the Search Game?

Now this is a very interesting development that I thought was a joke at first.

In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine
Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market
consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.

As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.

So Ask.com is becoming a married woman's Q&A portal (I guess) instead of going for Googles scraps as the number 5 search engine. It does make sense since a married woman make alot of household purchasing decisions. This may be an interesting way to run a search company in general as well.

I always wished there was a TechSearch, a GamingSearch, a StockSearch, etc. type of site that specialized its searches to only that subject. The problem with Google is that you always end u sorting through alot of garbage in order to find what you wanted.

With a TechSearch site you would have links to online forums, white papers, tech company websites, driver information etc. So you would do a search for Laserjet Hp 4300 and you would get the HP.com link to the driver as the first hit, then troubleshooting information, and finally some links to CDW to buy the item if you want. I think some smart person at Google should come up with this as an ad-on to their search site to provide some built-in targeting to their searches. A TechGoogle, a GamerGoogle, a WomansGoogle, MensGoogle etc. would be really cool way to break their searches up.