The year 2008 has begun with top executives leaving the top search engine companies. A couple of days back it was Yahoo!'s CPO, (Chief Performance Officer) who left the company to join Google. See: Yahoo!'s Chief Performance Officer Goes to Google!, now it's the CEO of Ask.com who's leaving his post, the announcement came late on Wednesday. He's not joining any of Ask's corporate rival search engines though, he would join the venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneur-in-residence.

Filling in the position of CEO, Ask.com would be the company's executive Jim Safka immediately. Safka, who's 39 would continue to hold his title as CEO of Primal Ventures, an IAC investment arm.

Safka's association with IAC has been an important one, "Safka served as CEO of IAC's online dating unit Match.com from 2004 to 2007. He has been credited with cultivating 25 percent annual revenue growth during his tenure and an annual 52 percent rise in operating income before amortization."

For some time now Ask.com has quite aggressively tried to better its position vis a vis Google, see: Ask.com Comes With Voice Activated Mobile Directions Feature! and Ask.com: Delete Your Footprints With AskEraser to bring in more benefits to the customers. The new CEO would take some time to sink in and it's going to be tough to maintain the advances that Ask.com has achieved off late.

Via: Reuters

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