jimbeetle - 4:38 am on Mar 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the southern and midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.

Well, I'm a single guy who lives in NYC; I don't fit this profile at all; I use it when I think it will give better results than G, etal.

Rebranding as a "women's site" it simply ridiculous. As all of us who have followed Ask over the years knows, its technology and its innovations are bar none. Back in what, 2003?, when Paul Gardi presented at PubCon he did the usual old stuff. Then when he visited table during lunch he revealed the "new" Ask, able to filter and aggregate results by "community" by query -- in real time! That was a uge jump in capability.

Ask doesn't need rebranding, it needs more money for more storage, more indexing -- just more and more.