Ask.com CEO: We Have Best Special Sauce

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, recently made some interesting comments to The Guardian’s Kate Bulkley. Lanzone talked about the current state of affairs at Ask, and also spoke about the company’s future. He deserves credit for not giving typical responses that have obviously been polished by the PR department.

When Bulkley stated that, compared to Google, “your basic algorithmic search is not as good,” Lanzone agreed. You have to admire that honesty. “I would also say we have the most upside potential because we are five years younger than Google,” he pointed out. He then launched into a cooking analogy.

“What we have is probably what I would call the best special sauce,” Lanzone said. “We do the hardest part well. What we don’t do well enough yet are the basics, the ingredients, the infrastructure of search that requires a lot of manpower and a lot of resources and a lot of trial and error. So I think about it like we have gourmet chefs who have been using worse ingredients to make a search engine.”

As to what the future holds for Ask, Lanzone refrained from making any vague generalizations about growth. “The big difference for us is that we are going to stay focused on search,” he said. “We are going to continue to build great doorways, not destinations. The product roadmap for us is to be able to find stuff that you’re looking for faster, whether it’s content, commerce or community. Our first job is to become a preferred primary search engine.”

“Now because search engines are naturally hubs to the internet,” Lanzone continued, “people may want email from us as a matter of convenience, but it’s nowhere on our roadmap today. If there was demand, I could see us building it, but I don’t see us getting into the content business. Our job is to search content, not provide it.”

The rest of the interview is available here.

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