Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy
Will privacy sell? — Ask.com is betting it will. The fourth-largest search engine company will begin a service today called AskEraser, which allows users to make their searches more private. — Ask.com and other major search engines like Google …
Context & Ripple Effects
Privacy has been on search engines' agenda since at least a 2006 CNET survey of how search firms handle user data, but no major player had turned it into a consumer-facing product. Ask.com, the fourth-largest search engine, is doing exactly that with AskEraser, which lets users search without leaving a query trail.
The move lands awkwardly against Ask's own commercial arc: earlier in 2007, Read/WriteWeb framed the company's future around its advertising business, and targeted advertising runs on retained query data. AskEraser is a differentiator play against Google precisely where Google's economics are most dependent on keeping that data.
First-order effects
- Ask.com gains a concrete privacy feature none of the larger engines offer at launch, giving the #4 player a talking point against Google in a market it cannot win on relevance or scale alone.
- Users who enable AskEraser trade personalized results for non-retention of searches — an explicit choice between convenience and data exposure that other engines do not yet force.
Second-order effects
- Google and the other major engines face pressure to match deletion or anonymous-mode options, converting privacy from a policy page into a product roadmap item.
- If AskEraser adoption grows among Ask's users, the company dilutes its own query-log inventory for ad targeting — a direct tension with the advertising-first strategy laid out in its 2007 plans.
Third-order effects
- If opt-out search logging spreads across the industry, search providers will have to reconcile data-driven ad models with verifiable non-retention, likely pushing differentiation toward trust claims and eventually regulatory attention on log retention practices.
The trend: Search competition is shifting from relevance and index size toward privacy features, with smaller players using data-retention policy as a wedge against incumbents.