Gary Price joins Ask

Earlier this week I found out that Gary Price is leaving Search Engine Watch to go to Ask as Director of Online Information Resources. Sounds like Gary will remain in D.C.; in his stead, Barry Schwartz is joining SEW in Gary’s place.

I remember one of the first times I sat down to talk to Gary and answer a few questions. I ended up with a full page of to-do notes. For example, why didn’t every airline flight as a query trigger Google’s flight status onebox? Good times. More recently, I remember listening to a Daily SearchCast where Gary was filling in, and Greg Boser called him one of the hardest working bloggers on the web. I could almost hear the hesitation in Gary’s voice; I could imagine Gary thinking “I’m not just a blogger! I’m a librarian and a consultant! I’ve co-written books about search. I call out useful information at ResourceShelf, including a mailing list! You’re calling me a blogger?!” But in the end, Gary just took the compliment in the friendly way it was intended, because Gary is a nice guy.

I recently read Scoble’s post that asserted that other search engines don’t get as much attention as Google. I hereby promise that I will talk more about Ask in the future, just because they’ve got Gary on their team now. Gary, I hope you’ll still rant at me when you spot problems at Google. 🙂

17 Responses to Gary Price joins Ask (Leave a comment)

  1. Good evening Matt

    See you much productive today 🙂

    “Gary, I hope you’ll still rant at me when you spot problems at Google.”

    You don’t need to wait for Gary. The folks at WMW are already doing a great job on that subject 🙂

    Have a great weekend, Matt.

  2. Hello Matt

    I see the new market survey for Gmail outsourcing, did I have anything to do with it?

    A friend and I both wrote a detailed article on a new marketing strategy for Gmail and we would like you to look at it.

    Hey you should always push Open Innovation models for product design!!!
    Thanks the articles are below

    http://www.techrd.com/?p=104

    http://www.webarticles.com/Computers/Software/Google-Attack-Spam%2C-Please%21%21-

  3. Nice to see the friendship within the SEO community. Tally-ho Matt :)!

  4. I originally was just going to write that it is great that you will be giving some love to ASK, as I have always been a fan. However, the combination of your previous post about SEO issues and looking at the comments page brought up a question.

    In many blogs that are set up similarly to yours, you have the front page with blog posts, and then you have the comment/permalink page as well, that also has the blog post. Could this situation cause duplicate content penalties? Do you think you can write something in a future post giving some details about this kind of penalty, the more I think about it now, the more ambiguous it seems. Sorry this is kind of stream of conciousness.

  5. Sure, Josh, I can try to talk about that at some point.

  6. As an annonymous Ask Search employee, this a post that makes me much more confident about our aquisition of Gary. Our own web log posting about Gary’s arrival really didn’t do justice to his recent efforts as a Search industry watchdog. His own bio only mentions his expertice in research resource consulting.

    An objective, opinionated and harsh look at our own Web Spam duplicate elimination and content categorization efforts are exacty what the butler ordered.

    If Gary has any time left after consulting us on our own need for improvement, we’ll let you borrow him for a few days to keep Google search on it’s toes.

  7. awww…I’m sure SEW is going to miss him, hehe

    It’s great to see how inviting the seo community generally is… *cheers*

  8. It seems that ASK is putting together a nice team of employees over there and are working hard at making their search better for everyone.

  9. RE: “In many blogs that are set up similarly to yours, you have the front page with blog posts, and then you have the comment/permalink page as well, that also has the blog post. Could this situation cause duplicate content penalties?”

    If there is such a thing, yes. IMO, the way around this would be to block one within a robots.txt file.

  10. Matt, that was an incredibly nice thing you said about Gary. When you give a complement you don’t mess around.

  11. It’s great to see such friendlyness between rival search companies.

    I’m relatively new to your blog, but it’s certainly fantastic reading and full of useful tips. Keep it comin’.

  12. Is Gary the new Jeeves ;)?

  13. Dean, thats funny.

    It’s seems with all of Gary’s experience, they should make a new search engine called “Ask Gary”.

  14. Ask is doing a fine job, and with Gary at the helm of OIR, I am sure they will go from strength to strength. Good luck Gary!

  15. Nice post Matt.

    Great to have a bit of industry affirmation for Gary – big ups to him on his Ask move!

  16. Ask has always been the good quality yet largely unnoticed search entity. Part of this was their questionable approaches to rebranding and consolidation. Maybe they are going to become a real contender which will be good for everybody including Google. Nothing brings out the best in everybody like strong and deep competition.

  17. Once again no offense to Matt or Google but I have to agree competition is good. I dont believe Google will EVER have a real reason to follow its own guidelines and mission statement until of Do No Evil until there is some competition out there for them and at this time there isnt. The one statement I will always remember from my father, we all know that most of us males didnt listen to our fathers because what could they know that we didnt already is ” The same people you see going up that ladder of success, you will see coming right back down it”

    I would say that the first SE that can set guidelines for webmaster, follow those guidelines and hold all to the same set of standards no matter how small or large you are as a company, brand themselves, try and become a friend to the webmaster community as Matt is trying to and most important rid their engine of spam will be the search engine that propels its way to the top market share. To poke a little fun also the first SE that gets rid of DMOZ 🙂

    Right now Google is not following its own mission statement of Do No Evil, they are trying but have shown that they will turn a blind eye to spam that is sitting in front of them. Matt/ Google is trying to relate to the webmaster community to build a strong relationship but hasnt shown it can act yet on all the advice this community is offering. Its almost like if you want to protect your home, hire a thief the build you a security system. Google has had some effect on spam but has not addressed what has been placed directly in front of them with spam and this sets an example that leads spammers to believe that Google might overlook these tactics if it is in Googles best interest.

    Yahoo doesnt know what they are doing. Yahoo seems to be a bit confused. Yahoo is trying to impliment aspects from Google and MSN. Yahoo however has applied a set of standards that they seem to hold ALL TO and not just SOME, so for this they score the top grade above all search engines. As for Yahoo branding, it seems they lack the ability to market themselves to the mass public and have all but given up to compete with Google.

    MSN, now this is IMHO right now is the only company that has the ability to compete with Google. MSN is still miles behind Google but they are working to create a SE that offers more relevancy than Google does at this present moment. MSN has the same problem though of addressing spam as Google does. Even though IMO MSN results are more relevant than Google’s, MSN results contain a lot of sites in the top of their serps that use spam techniques and I dont believe that they have the ability yet for their bot to detect a lot of spam. As for branding IMO again I forsee MSN as being the only company that has the financial backing to brand their name beyond what Google has already achieived for internet search. With a few buyouts here and there by both MSN and Google it should make the future of both search engines very interesting.

    Maybe a company such as Ask can come in and take the mistakes that all the big three engines have made and not learn from as it appears then create an elite SE. IMO the general public is becoming more educated about the internet. The SE that is able to meet the consumers needs and the needs of the small mom and pop company who has a vested interest on the WWW will become the choice for the general public. There are more mom and pop companies out there than giant corporations on the internet, there are more average Joe users out there than techno geeks. The idea that whoever has the largest index, highest stock prices, most technology or coolest name should not suggest a long term monopoly of the internet and again IMO doesnt mean anything to the general public.

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