When I first saw this over at Aaron Schiff’s, I thought it must have come from the Onion. But no, it’s for real:
In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives…
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.
Now that’s what I call a scaling-back.