Ask City Launches Amid High Expectations
Barry Diller is putting a lot of pressure on Ask. He keeps talking about Ask's role in IAC's overall operation and local in particular. When he acquired Ask for almost $2 billion Diller immediately touted Ask's ability to knit together …
Context & Ripple Effects
Barry Diller paid almost $2 billion for Ask and has spent the year since framing it as more than a distant fourth search engine — Diller Asks Jeeves to Grow captured his push to make the property earn its price. The thesis he keeps repeating: Ask should be the front door to IAC's local assets, not just a query box.
AskCity is that thesis made product — a local search service built on IAC-owned content rather than crawling alone. The story traveled unusually widely for an Ask launch, with pickups from The New York Times, CNET News.com, and GigaOM all covering the same unveiling, a signal of how much attention the local-search race commands.
First-order effects
- IAC gains a distribution surface for its own local inventory: Ask's results pages can now route queries toward Citysearch and sibling properties instead of sending that traffic to competitors' maps and yellow-pages products.
Second-order effects
- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's local products face a rival whose cost structure is partly internalized — content and sales forces already owned by IAC — which pressures them to deepen their own local-content partnerships or acquisitions.
Third-order effects
- If Diller's integration holds, the pattern points to search competition being fought by conglomerates bundling owned media and commerce assets behind a query box, rather than purely on index size and ranking algorithms.
The trend: Local search is becoming the proving ground where diversified media companies like IAC attempt to convert owned-content portfolios into search-market relevance against larger pure-play engines.