Interviews: Battelle Asks Lanzone, Odden Meets Whalen
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Written By Reprise Media | April 19, 2006 | Share This
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Good interviews always seem to come in twos, and John Battelle got Ask.com Senior VP & General Manager Jim Lanzone to sit for one of them. While there’s no mention of primate-fueled TV ads, there’s plenty of talk about what an “underdog” engine can offer in a search world dominated by Google’s “10 blue links.”
Battelle calls out Ask’s reported relevancy problems for last names and business names. Says Lanzone, “we’re far better than we’ve ever been, but we’re not as good as we want to be.” To that end, he says to look for gradual improvements in Ask’s algorithmic search between now and the end of the year. As for right now, he says Ask is “doing some things better than” Google, and “we feel passionately that there is more to search [than] the Google paradigm.” When Battelle points out the size disparity between Ask and the big three, Lanzone pleads for some perspective:
“…Just one point of share has an incredible impact on our business growth, and I think people forget that because they’re comparing us to Google, rather than to our own growth curve…we’re still a top player in the #1 activity online outside of email. We’re anything but small. Collectively we operate the 6th largest (just passed Amazon last month) Web property in the world. It’s just that you’re looking at us relative to the GYM behemoths, who admittedly are a level above us.”
From an SE to an SEO Elsewhere, Lee Odden has a comprehensive chat with writer, speaker and SEO consultant Jill Whalen, who’s been ranking highly since the days of Infoseek. She offers advice to SEO newbies, and really cuts loose when Odden asks what the engines could do to better communicate with SEOs. A snip:
“You’ll find I differ from most SEOs on this question. I don’t think the search engines should be communicating with the SEO community at all. Why would they? Why would we need them to? Our job is to figure them out not to have them spoon feed us what to do. What fun is it for them to tell us the rules? Blech, how boring that would be!”
Related: Our own sit-down with Lanzone, from way back when a guy named Jeeves worked with him.
Topics: Interviews |