By Andrew Albanese

• Ask.com trails Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft
• Branding campaign didn't work
• Company did stress privacy

Is it all over for Ask.com? This week Ask.com announced that it was essentially giving up on its plans to become a serious player in a search engine market overwhelmingly dominated by Google, saying it would lay off roughly 40 employees. Those departing include librarian Gary Price, the man behind ResourceShelf and Docuticker. In a personal post on ResourceShelf, Price said Ask.com's retreat was sad news, but declared "this two year adventure (almost to the day) has been fun, educational, and all around a great time.".

While Ask.com's services were rated highly by search engine experts, it just couldn't make a dent in Google's dominant position (66% of searches in February, according to Hitwise), or even trailing search engines Yahoo! (21%), and Microsoft (7%), logging just 4%.number two competitor to Google, were notably bleak. Commented blogger Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land. "To me, this shows that we now only have Google, Yahoo and Microsoft."

Price, a well-known figure among librarians, joined Ask.com in 2006 as the company announced its intentions to compete in the search market. Since then Ask.com invested in both technology and media, with a slate of comic television ads and a branding campaign. In a 2006 interview, Price told the LJ Academic Newswire that his role at Ask.com was to function as a "go-to person for the library community, to help make the Ask.com product better for everybody." Indeed, it seemed the company was making headway, at least in terms of its service if not its numbers. In 2007, Ask.com unveiled a strong privacy stance becoming the first major search engine to give consumers the option of preventing "retention of their search history at the time of their search."