Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

TV is really in the gutter these days. It’s no wonder everyone’s dropping the remotes in favor of the laptops. (Please come back Seinfeld!)

NBC’s latest show, Treasure Hunters, debuted tonight in the U.S. In typical fashion, a handful of advertisers are sponsoring the show. Chief among them is Ask.com. No shocker, considering Ask’s head Barry Diller apparently has a stake in the network.

The show features teams solving riddles and questions while running from point to point. Contestants receive a Motorola mobile phone and a laptop “with special access to Ask.com and its unique search features.”

Aside from the T-shirts everyone on the show wears, touting the search engine formerly know as Jeeves, the following missed opportunity came to mind:

Ask.com is looking for a unique position in the search market (a certain Mountain View-based company has the desktop browser position covered). Mobile is the next frontier. Why not have the contestants access Ask.com via their mobile phones while running around like headless chickens?

Logging into a laptop, by contrast, isn’t very feasible while actively locating treasure. Such a move would help position Ask.com as the premier provider of mobile search solutions – a position still up in the air, last I checked.

Eh, who knows. Maybe Motorola has a deal with MSN that wouldn’t allow them to promote Ask via their phones. Maybe Ask’s mobile technology isn’t ready for prime time. Or, maybe the NBA Finals is more entertaining at the moment.

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