The newly rebranded Ask.com said Monday that Jim Lanzone, the company’s vice president of product management since 2001, will replace Steve Berkowitz as the underdog search engine’s CEO.

Ask’s parent company, Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp, moved quickly to appoint Mr. Lanzone to the company’s top post after Mr. Berkowitz said Friday he was leaving Ask to become a senior vice president at MSN’s online business group.

The shuffling in the corner office at Ask’s Oakland, California headquarters follows a makeover of Ask’s web site, which involved dumping the company’s butler logo.

Mr. Lanzone, 35, said he would keep the company on the same path charted by his predecessor, which for the No. 5 search engine amounts to luring new users by the thousands rather than Google’s millions.

That strategy is at once modest and daunting. Of the 6.4 billion online searches conducted in the United States last month, Ask fielded only 5.9 percent of them, according to comScore Networks.

While underscoring the point that Ask does not aim to unseat Google as the king of search, it does seek more market share. It has been succeeding. The 376 million queries handled by Ask in March represent a nearly half a percentage point increase over the same month a year ago. Not a big increase, but not bad either when one considers that only Google gained market share during the same period. Yahoo, MSN, and AOL all lost market share.

For years, first as AskJeeves, and more recently as Ask, the search engine has found itself in the frustrating position of having search technology lauded by the industry as first rate, yet stymied when it came to attracting consumers. Ask’s recent gains have been encouraging, said Steve Weinstein, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.

“In a market this big, there is always an opportunity,” he said.