“Outsourcing to China and failed auction killed Bloglines”

Written on 21st October 2008 12 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.

This is what Michael Arrington wrote three days ago in a post titled “Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader“. We’re glad to bring you the story behind this “destruction”, since multiple sources who are really close to Bloglines told us the two main reasons for Bloglines’ downfall. On one condition, they want to remain anonymous.

Arrington wrote the post as he noticed a tweet by Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher. He founded the service in 2003, sold it two years later to Ask.com, and now, three years later, he’s thinking of switching to Google Reader:

Ask.com want’s to get rid of Bloglines

The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including TechCrunch (and you don’t want to piss them off). There are basically two reasons for this: a lack of commitment from Ask.com and a somewhat unfortunate outsourcing experiment.

According to our sources, Ask.com put Bloglines up for sale earlier this year, in an effort to cut costs. The company was expecting an auction to take place in August, but these plans sort of vanished as nobody seems to be aware about it.

When you look at Ask.com’s recent strategic moves, anyone can tell that it’s aiming for a larger share in the search market. Mainly by adopting technologies that several alternative search engines have successfully launched (e.g. related searches and clustering results). Oh, and don’t forget about the sexy ads. As it looks now, we can also add cutting costs to the company strategy.

Outsourcing Bloglines to China

Part of that is outsourcing the Bloglines development to China, our sources told us. Thanks to Twitter Search, we’ve found some confirmation. Ex-Bloglines engineer Paul Querna told Mark Fletcher via Twitter that “Ask.com moved all of the bloglines engineering to china, what did you expect :P”.

This cutting move apparently didn’t work out, as Bloglines’ problems still haven’t been fixed. It’s sad to see what can become of a promising start-up when a mother company doesn’t have a heart for it (Jaiku, anyone?).

ask.com, Bloglines, google reader, Mark Fletcher, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, twitter

12 Comments »

Ask.com first giant to copy alt search engines

Written on 6th October 2008 2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

At the San Francisco Altsearchengines.com meeting last April, the general opinion was that without those alternative engines, there would be little innovation in search. No new frontiers would be explored. Those search start-ups come with new algorithms, smart crowd source approaches, and different UI’s. But in the end, aren’t these engines just inspiration for the big guys who can copy the improved ways of searching withing a few months?

If you look at the new Ask.com, you’d say this is true. Although some say it looks like Mahalo, you can also state the engine has adopted several typical alt search engines features like:

Clustering of results: if you search for Obama, you’ll get a short description, picture, and links to the Official Site, films, music, Wikipedia, and the senatorial site.
Related Searches. In the case of Obama his running mate, wife, and main rival.
A collection of thumbnails with Obama’s face

My guess is that this will mark the beginning of a copy trend. Every successful alt search engine will see its main USP being adopted by the major search engines.

altsearchengines, ask.com, barack obama, search

2 Comments »

Ask.com: Is 5% not enough?

Written on 10th January 2008 3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Jim Lanzone in happier times…

Last week Don Dodge (Director, Business Development at Microsoft) calculated that each 1% of market share in search is worth at least $1 Billion in market cap. That may be but Ask.com, which has ‘only’ has 5% of the search market, seems to be struggling.

Just yesterday it announced that it is replacing its CEO Jim Lanzone with InterActive Corp. (IAC) executive Jim Safka. Safka also worked at Match.com, E*Trade and AT&T.

Lanzone had only been with Ask.com since April 2006 when he replaced Steve Berkowitz who left at that time to head up Microsoft’s MSN and Windows Live platforms. Don’t write Lanzone off by the way! He is joining Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Expect to hear from him again soon.

So what can be learned here? Well, maybe that having a large chunk of traffic isn’t a ticket to success. Monetizing traffic and turning visitors into users isn’t easy. Just ask Jim Lanzone and Steve Berkowitz. Or better yet, lets ask you: how would you monetize 5% of the search market?

Ask.com’s traffic over the last 3 years:
Ask.com Alexa Score .