After Nascar, Ask.com Gets Physical With TNA

Earlier this year Ask.com signed a deal with NASCAR racing to be the “official search partner” for the racing network. It sure seems like these days the “official” notation just means whoever will pay the most. Danny Sullivan has a good recap of the NASCAR search deal.

This weekend I noticed that Ask.com is now partnering with TNA wrestling.  You can see a screenshot of the promo below. Basically the announcer mentioned a trivia question and said you could go to Ask.com and after entering the full question, you will be provided with the correct answer. The concept has some potential although I think it will work better for NASCAR than TNA.

With the NASCAR deal, Ask.com controls the search on the nascar.com website. The official TNA website has a search engine in the middle of the page however it takes you to a site called SwagBucks with a search that is powered by Google and Ask. Even more interesting, the search results don’t seem to match the query very well. For example, a search for one of their current roster of wrestlers, Scott Steiner, brings me to a generic results page with not one result from the TNA website.

Perhaps the new Ask Jeeves character needs a DDT or a Hulkster legdrop to get his mind right about how site search results should work.