In the story "Ask.com bets on semantic search, targeting special audiences," posted on Thursday, the last name of Ask Networks President Scott Garell was misspelled.
The story has been corrected on the wire and the paragraphs 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 and 16 now read:
Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks, views things from a different perspective, pointing out that Ask.com's queries are growing. The search engine handled 486 million U.S. queries in May 2008 and 555 million in May of this year, according to comScore. "In a very tough and competitive market, we're holding our own," he said in an interview.
Garell also points out that Ask.com and the other sites that make up the Ask Network, like Dictionary.com, are collectively the sixth-largest Web property in the U.S., ahead of powerhouses like eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon, according to comScore.
Garell is particularly encouraged by Ask.com's advances in semantic search and in its attempts to attract specific audiences like NASCAR fans to the search engine.
"People don't talk in keywords," Garell said.
According to Garell, that perception persists, although after the dot-com bubble burst, Ask Jeeves abandoned the consumer search market for several years to focus on enterprise search, before reversing course in 2003.
Garell thinks Ask.com can pursue this "audience-centric" strategy with eight to 10 vertical markets per year, having seen that it's an effective and interesting approach to promoting and growing usage of the search engine.