Ask Dot JP(ask.jp) announced [J] the end of its search engine service in Japan, to restructure their business operation.
On 25th of this month, June 2009, web search, blog search, product search and category search will be closed. They had already closed down their movie and image search last month. The announcement says that some services for enterprises will be kept.
Ask Dot JP, a Japanese counterpart of Ask.com, was established by Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com, a part of IAC) and Japanese company TransCosmos Inc., IT services provider forming conglomerate around the internet (J-Stream, DoubleClick, Fujisan Magazine Service, NetMile, NetRatings, etc.), which is listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange the first section (code 9175). TransCosmos also was known to be involved with TechCrunch Japan until recently.
Japanese search engine market share data on NetRatings/Nielsen newsletter in 2008/10 [J] listed up Yahoo!, Google, MSN/Live, goo, Biglobe, Nifty, Infoseek, Excite and Baidu, but no Ask.jp is there.
