Ask.com is not shutting down. They are ending their in-house general crawling & search system to focus on the Q&A aspect. These articles[1],[2] have better details. They will be continuing to offer general search results on ask.com, but outsourced through an unknown provider.
"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.
Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.
Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."
Ex Ask.com engineer here, left around a year ago. The big focus on Q&A and the (partial) outsourcing of general web search had been going on since early 2009, if not even earlier. And yes, it's Google.
Oh well, it's been a good run, I've been expecting something like this to go down for quite some time now. I'm actually surprised Diller hasn't pulled the plug yet for good.
"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.
Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.
Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."
[1]: http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-en... [2]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/iac-s-diller-surren...