I’ve been using the Internet as a source of information and as a shopping mall for more than a decade now, and over that period of time, I’ve seen many companies come and go, one time giants such as Alta Vista have fallen by the wayside or been taken over, and Google has come to rule the world of search.

Of course there are more search engines than just Google, Yahoo and MSN offer good results, and around a third of all internet users find what they are looking for with these two search engines, Lycos still offers a search, and there are smaller players like Clusty and Gigablast that alos boast large enough indices to offer good and relevant results, and then of course there is Ask.

Despite being owned by IAC, the company that also owns Expedia and Tripadvisor, Ask has never hit the heights it probably deserves to. Ask was traditionally the engine used by internet novices, its natural language interface, and the friendly presence of the valet Jeeves made it seem somewhat friendlier than its rivals, and yet, despite its one time popularity, it seems to have slumped towards obscurity.

Even high profile advertising campaigns have done little to bring back the punters, and it’s a real shame, because the technology underpinning the search engine is beautifully elegant, and it returns some of the most accurate results around.

I think that it’s a victim of the greed of its owners. While Google and Yahoo have their sponsored links, they only have two or three above their natural results, whereas Ask plasters five paid links in the same spot. And this is for all searches, not just the high demand ones. This means that users will often get adverts that are irrelevant to their query because the search engine is forcing low quality paid results over the high quality natural ones. Poor results mean poor satisfaction, and as everyone in business knows, its harder to get a customer than to keep one, meaning that unless they restore confidence in their results, Ask will continue to see their customer base decline.