Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC, which owns Ask.com, Match.com, Evite, and College Humor, among many others, has just launched Rushmore Drive, a new online community geared toward blacks and centered around an ???ethnic,??? Ask.com-powered search engine that delivers both mainstream results and results targeted toward African Americans. ???Every person is looking for a more relevant search result,??? Johnny Taylor, head of IAC???s Black Web Enterprises Inc. unit and chief executive of RushmoreDrive.com, told the Charlotte Observer. ???It recognizes who you are, so you can find what you???re looking for every time.???
Is that true? Just to test out that theory, and being of the core demographic, I searched some general terms on both Rushmore Drive and Ask.com to see how the first-page results differed.
Ask.com isn’t just laying off 8 percent of its work force — Barry Diller’s struggling search engine is remaking itself into a women’s website, with a focus on entertainment and health. Of course, the IAC-owned unit has been down this road before. When it continued losing market share to Google and its pals, it ditched its “Jeeves” branding for a more streamlined look. That gimmick didn’t work, either.