IAC announced that it was laying off 8% (about 40 people) of the Ask.com workforce and that the search engine would be refocused to target women over 30, which they claim represents about 65% of their users. Ask.mom anyone? They also indicated that they would be refocusing on the question-formatted search, a la the old Ask Jeeves. So why should those of us who are not women over 30 care? Because Ask was the true innovator in search right now and they are deciding to take a HUGE step backward. Sure, Google has all kinds of nifty things that may or may not ever make it out of Google Labs, but Ask made changes to their search results pages that should have changed the way we all look at and use search. And now, in all likelihood, it’s all about to go away and that sucks.

So who is to blame for this terrible decision? The easy answer is Barry Diller, the Chairman and CEO of IAC, Ask’s parent company. The conspiracy theorist’s answer is that Barry’s wife, Diane Von Furstenberg, pushed for the move to give women a search engine to call their own. The real answer? Look in the mirror. You, me, and the majority of Internet users are to blame. We have been so brainwashed by Google that we spend the extra time typing google.com when ask.com is shorter. We have been so busy being “hip” by “Googling” everything that we didn’t recognize the tangible value of the Ask.com search results page, with it’s neatly organized blocks of relevant video, audio, image, news, and Wikipedia entries. We eschewed the convenient “Narrow Your Search,” “Expand Your Search” and “Related Names” lists on the left side of the results pages, instead opting to retype our search query all over while adding a word or two to make it more specific or alter it’s focus. We stupidly ignored the outstanding preview feature - those little binoculars that would show you a thumbnail of the page behind the link so you could find the right result before leaving the page. Nah, I’d rather click a result and hit the back button, click the next one and hit the back button, maybe do it a couple of more times before I find the page I’m looking for. Internet users are, apparently, a largely masochistic bunch.

Lest you think I am a regular user of Ask.com who is spouting sour grapes, let me assure you that I am equally as guilty of falling into the Google trap. Like a robot, I type google.com whenever I need to search the World Wide Web. It is nearly an involuntary action, like blinking and breathing. I would have a rare moment of clarity and actually use Ask.com once in a while, and I loved the results I got and the ingenuity and usability of the page they were presented on. So why didn’t I use it all the time? I, and I suspect many of you readers out there, can’t fully answer that question. But that doesn’t mean we can’t explore it.

Ask was a search engine lacking a position. Google was the hip choice and the market leader. Yahoo was the long-standing authority who had always been there for us. MSN was, well, the default home page for Internet Explorer, the most used browser in the world. Ask was… that quirky little engine that you could ask questions of. No, wait, they moved away from that years ago. So how come my wife still calls it “Ask Jeeves?” Even when Ask ditched Jeeves and decided to play with the big boys, they never identified and targeted a large enough demographic to get them major market share. They focused on trying to get the pseudo-hip techie-types away from Google with the “It’s the Algorithm” campaign, and while they succeeded on some small level, they never made a serious dent. Then they showcased all the useful pieces of their search results page, comparing it to the bland results provided by Google and the others. But those ads never quite worked, in my opinion. So we never had a compelling reason to switch all of our search activity to Ask.com.

Ask also (at least to my knowledge) never got into the Web-based e-mail thing like Google and Yahoo. With the success of web-based e-mail services, led largely by Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail, and the easy access to Web search that those services provide, you have to wonder if Ask missed the boat on a major gateway to search traffic.

In retrospect, Ask was kind of like that syrupy sweet Aunt who always pinched your cheeks when she saw you. You never went out of your way to visit her, but now that she’s gone you realize that you’re going to miss the awesome homemade double chocolate chunk cookies she gave you and the way she would go out of her way to make you happy when you did visit. That’s how I feel about Ask. Now that the things I love about it are rumored to be going away, I realize that I shouldn’t have taken it for granted.

Pardon me while I visit the old girl one last time…