Ask.com announced Tuesday that it will cut 130 jobs at its Edison, NJ and Hangzhou, China locations and move away from investment in algorithmic Web search development.

The company will shut down its offices in both locations in the next few months, and will consolidate staff at its Bay Area headquarters, Ask.com confirmed. Some employees from NJ and China will be asked to relocate to California.

"We need a team that is able to work side by side, face to face, idea to idea, as much as possible. We simply aren't able to do that with our team fractured across the country, across the globe," Doug Leeds, president of Ask.com, wrote in a blog post.

Going forward, Ask.com will focus on the Q&A element of its site.

"We know that receiving answers to questions is why Ask.com users come to the site, and we are now serving them in everything we do, Leeds continued. "Unfortunately, this absolute focus means that we need to stop investing in things outside of providing users with the best answers, including making the huge capital investment required to support algorithmic web search development."

Independent Web search is not part of Ask.com's strategy, Leeds said.

"We have access to multiple third party structured and unstructured data feeds that, when integrated, can provide a web search experience on par with what we are able to produce internally, at much lower costs."

The company denied that it will be shutting down Ask.com and said there its strategy "still requires a great deal of technology investment and technical innovation."

In July, Ask.com said it was readying a major redesign, which started with the launch of a public beta of its new answer technology.