Ask.com's Rising Star

hdtv writes "Fortune magazine takes a look at Ask.com, a site originally designed to respond to queries in human language that grew into a full-blown search engine after the Teoma acquisition. According to Fortune, Ask.com has many features not available with rivals -- topic clusters, quick facts from Wikipedia on the search page, and, (what counts most) fewer ads than any of the rivals. Currently Ask.com maintains 5.9% share, a share that Fortune is sure will grow."

Clusty?

Clusters and Wikipedia ... Surely you mean clusty.com [slashdot.org] right?

Lack of ads counts most?

I don't think anyone is really bothered by ads any more. Those that want to see ads (or don't care either way) can see them, and those that don't want to see them don't have to (AdBlock). What's the problem? This is not a big issue in my opinion.

Re:Lack of ads counts most?

Text ads are difficult to Adblock - you can Greasemonkey them, but it's hassle. On top of that, the ones on ask.com seem to be very annoying - a long list that takes half the page, so they are very difficult to ignore. I prefer Google's less prominent ones.

"Quick Facts from Wikipedia" ???

How can they tell if what they are lifting are facts?

Seriously.

I wondered what was going to happen when the first "Internet Generation" of kids who went through school believing everything they read on the Web finally got out into the workplace. Now, I suppose, I know.

And I am very, very afraid...

Re:"Quick Facts from Wikipedia" ???

This is the same as trusting the newspapers, tv sound bytes and what celebrities say. You cannot make serious decisions about anything unless you do in depth research and take all sides into consideration.

I call this "thinking". I do no think it is exclusive to any generation.

Jeeves?

Hmm, if they bring back Jeeves [wikipedia.org], I might contemplate using them ;) Seriously though, I doubt Ask.com will manage to grab much more marketshare. Wikipedia facts are nice and all, but Wikipedia results tend to come up high on Google results anyway. I think that there are simply not enough people who are willing to switch: look at the incredibly large marketshare IE6 continues to have to this day. I doubt they'll be able to withstand Google, Yahoo & MSN in the long run. I have to admit that Bloglines is nice, I use it all the time, and since it exports OPML I can always switch and take my feeds with me.

Maps at Ask.com

The only reference in TFA about ask.com maps is "Its map and image search products, too, offer distinct advantages over the competition. Not much. However, see the maps tools [ask.com] and read a review of it [directionsmag.com]. If these maps-topics is of your interest, see also http://slashgeo.org/ [slashgeo.org] :-)

Priorities

Ask.com has many features not available with rivals -- topic clusters, quick facts from Wikipedia on the search page, and, (what counts most) fewer ads than any of the rivals.

If that's what matters most to you in a search engine, wouldn't Goatse.cx (R.I.P.) have been better than Ask, Google and Yahoo combined? I don't think it had any ads...

Full-blown...

a site originally designed to respond to queries in human language that grew into a full-blown search engine after the Teoma acquisition

They make it sound like an "upgrade", but it's the opposite. I bet I could use ask.com if it could really answer questions and they concentrated on that, instead of being a generic search engine.

In further news

Some business magazine said Burger King Burgers are really yummy and only losers eat at McDonalds. Furthermore, all of the really cool kids hang out at Burger King now.

What about punctuation?

The next thing I want in a search engine is for punctuation to be a part of the search.
For example, how do you search for the difference between the following 2 LaTeX commands:

\circle
\circle*

(I know the answer now, but I had to look it up in my reference book, as google was just about worthless for my "latex star" query)

And most importantly

you can get a ask.com firefox toolbar! At least they're innovative..

Dead website

Hmmmmm, ASK.com is a dead search engine. I don't know about you but my fingers automaticly type "google" or "yahoo" when i need to find something. What can Ask do about it? I am sure...They will be sold in couple years to google or yahoo or msn...

"how many fingers does a human being have?"

Ask.com's first result is a webpage on How many fingers can you fit into your ass? [ask.com]. Now that's useful... ;)

Not to give away good ideas, but...

If Google offers widgets in the search results, won't that blow away Ask.com's being stuck with Wikipedia? I just hope they credit me, since I know they're all reading this and thinking about it now.

Deceptive article...

quick facts from Wikipedia on the search page, and, (what counts most) fewer ads than any of the rivals

This is obviously untrue-- there are zero ads on Wikipedia, which seems to be where ask.com has lifted much of the content only to wrap it in paid-for-placement ad banners. Do a search on ask.com and you'll get the top-3 sponsored paid ad links first, then the top-ten actual search results, and then another 5 sponsored paid ad links. By my count, about forty percent of the links ask.com shows you when you search are ad links.

Next, we could consider the author, who isn't identified by name or email address, but by a link to a freshly registered domain that's just over two weeks old:

Registrant:
Digital Media Ventures LLC
701 First Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
US

Domain name: PLASMA-HDTV-PRICES.COM

Administrative Contact:
Alexander Moskalyuk, - [e-mail]
701 First Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
US
4083492977 Fax: [phone]

Technical Contact:
Alexander Moskalyuk, - [e-mail]
701 First Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
US
4083492977 Fax: [phone]

Record last updated on 19-May-2006.
Record expires on 13-May-2007.
Record created on 13-May-2006.

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.DREAMHOST.COM 66.33.206.206
NS2.DREAMHOST.COM 66.201.54.66

View the "page info" and take a look at the links, this seems to be nothing more than an article by a shill who is getting paid to promote products and/or do market research on people who read Slashdot.

Ask.com: Google's up-and-coming rival?!

The title of the article is "Ask.com: Google's up-and-coming rival", but I still want to know (and this is the third time I've asked):

Why is Ask.com considered a Google "rival" if it primarily serves Google ads?

(How do I know? It serves an ad I've only placed through Google.)

Re:Ask.com: Google's up-and-coming rival?!

Would you say MSN Search was _not_ a competitor of Yahoo Search, just because of the fact that they shared the ad system? (MSN Search used Overture (Yahoo) Ads until recently, when they in the US switched to their own AdCenter) I think the article indicates that Ask won't be using Google Ads indefintely, but that they'll contractually obliged to continue using Google for quite som time. From the article:

its ads are provided by that much-larger competitor, in a deal that extends through the end of next year.

There's no economy in search ads before you have a large number of advertisers. This is because of the auction driven pricing and the fact that you buy keywords and search phrases. So before you're big enough on your own, you need the scale of a bigger network to get any revenues to speak of.

So shall they make it completely on their own, they need to grow. That's why they, in my eyes, are a Google Competitor, even though Google (for the time being) earns money on their success.

PS! One irony: Ask tries to monetize Image Searches with Google Ads, an area where Google is not trying to earn money yet. So the irony goes both ways, apparently.

Deep not wide

I've noticed that ask.com has found some sites that weren't found in google, but more often than not they have bring up a lot fewer sites than google. I've found myself using them when I don't find something from google.

what Ask.com offers

According to Fortune, Ask.com has many features not available with rivals -- topic clusters, quick facts from Wikipedia on the search page, and, (what counts most) fewer ads than any of the rivals.

Topic clusters aren't available on other search engines? I guess they've never seen or heard of Mooter [mooter.com]. I've been using it for several months and I've never seen an ad though they do have a Sponsored Link in the top right corner. And while it doesn't have quick facts from Wikipedia on the first page, when I just did a search for slashdot, the second page of results included a link for the Slashdot effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [wikipedia.org]. When I add wikipedia as a search term I get more than 10 pages of results.

Falcon

Few Ads, but they're from Google

...fewer ads than any of the rivals

The author of this article praises ask.com for having fewer ads, but what he didn't realize is that the advertisements they do show are from Google Adwords. Much of the article compares Ask.com to Google and praises the former for being innovative and holding an edge over the others. Unfortunately, that point is somewhat hidden when you realize Google is profiting from their progress.

A Comeback for Teoma?

There's a dated poster that hangs in a fairly well traveled hallway in the CoRE Building [rutgers.edu] at Rutgers [rutgers.edu] where Teoma was developed. It is an enlarged copy of an article theorizing that Teoma would provide significant competition to Google. It's somewhat funny to look at since it was written in the forgotten era of Google being popular, but not dominant. In fact, here's the article [rutgers.edu]. My favorite quote: "Google has reached its maturity." Maybe this is Teoma's second chance at attacking Google.

Ask.com market share not growing

Even the link included in the slashdot article shows that the ask.com market share actually FELL over last year. So how is Ask.com "a rising star" then?

Ask.com is using the questionable AOL business model. That is they advertise a lot on TV and traditional media in order to draw in users that are new to the internet. That's all good and all but those new to the internet users eventually become slightly more experienced and learn that everybody else actually uses google for search, so they switch too. Thus, just like AOL ask.com more or less trains future clients of their competitors.

But meanwhile Ask.com keep the advertisement dollars flowing which gets them a nice favorable articles in Forbes and apparently they have decided to pay for some Slashvertisements as well.

A cheer for bathwater

The 'old' ask.com was pure crap. The 'new' ask.com appears to be blatant attempt to copy google in order to get a piece of their billion dollar valuation pie.

But I tried out a couple of genuine searches that frustrated me in both google and wikipedia. Their results were significantly better. :) :) So I am going to eat a bit of crow and use them from time to time.

Competition is a good thing. We wouldn't want google turning into another M$, would we? So what if they are re-using google ads and wiki content? The US media has been serving up used bathwater for decades.

ads are not bad things

Fewer ads doesn't make a site better. In fact the reverse could be true, if the ads are sufficiently well targeted. The better the ads are targeted, the more likely they are to be part of the signal rather than part of the noise.

It's the poorly targeted ads that waste pixels and bandwidth. But ad targeting is getting better over time and "fewer ads" doesn't mean "fewer blinking banners about irrelevant crap" like it did a few years ago.

And if you're searching with intent to buy, ads are even more likely to be signal rather than noise, and search sites with better ads may show you what you want in less time.

not the features, it is the filters

or the lack of them.

While google, yahoo and msn applies artificial filters to comply with law/money interest. ASK.com is pretty much showing what you want it to show.

Also somehow besides that, this is the last engine that somewhat not completely poisoned with spam and blog spam sites.

I miss teoma.com

You used to be able to go to teoma.com [teoma.com] and get a very clean page. now it redirects you to this [ask.com] fancy looking page. I still like Ask Desktop Search [ask.com]. It's a bit nicer in some ways than Google Desktop.

Clusters for everyone

Ask.com has many features not available with rivals -- topic clusters

Actually, you can "roll your own" topic clusters from results in Google, MSN, del.icio.us, etc. by using CQ web [q-phrase.com], a free contextual search agent for Windows and OS X.

Ask.com is different..

I have been a Google user fo a loong time, and am still a Google user. That being said, I have to admit that Ask.com does provide some unique features like the zoom and expand your search, which are extremely useful in a lot of situations. Also, for many of my searches, the relevance of the results are better than Google. Smart answers are another thing that used to be unique to Ask. Other search engines have caught up to it, but Ask still does the best job answering my questions. It is so much easier to type a question and get an answer, than looking around the web for the same thing. Some folks have mentioned that clustering was started by Clusty, well, that aint true, Teoma has had it from day 1, and the concept of communities and leaders among them is kinda unique to them. I dont know how many of you have used Teoma.com in the past, but the clusters and communities for my searches were fantastic. Ask.com carries a little bit of baggage from the past (dot com boom era), but they have moved away from that and are now a meaningful player in the search engine market. Forgot what you though about this company in the past. Go ahead and give it a try and you will see that it is a good search engine. Of course, there are lots of areas where they need to improve, like content, but I am sure they will catch up soon... Also, while you are at it, try out their world class image search product. It truly is one of the best I have seen. The Maps product that came out recently beat all other map products in the market. The quality of the ariel maps and some of the iteniery planning features just blew me away.. Btw, they just released a blog and feed search product that was extremely well received. Lots cool stuff, check it out.. I gotta give it to a company as small as this and coming out with so many cool stuff in such a short span of time! Look at it from a clean slate view and maybe you will feel the same.. More the number of players, better it is for the end user. More choice and competetion is almost always a good thing...

What a joke

ask.com, aka Ask Jeeves (remember those anoying commercials?), is a joke. They serve no purpose on the web anymore. With the improvement in search engine technology, they have become obsolete. I'd say they deserve to have such a tiny market share.

English only, so won't overpower other engines

I don't know why Ask.com decided to only allow searches in English but... an attempt to search in Ask.com [ask.com] would provide exactly zero rezults, versus about 10 000 in Google Search [google.com] or 600 in A9 [a9.com] (basically MSN search).
Yes, English-speaking users in US and Europe are valuable in terms of potential "click-revenue" but cutting out everyone else is, IMHO, bad policy (and Ask.com won't let you look up in Kanji either: this [ask.com] has one "sponsored click-link" versus 100 000 000 results from google [google.com] with same sponsored link :) ). That's why I don't believe in this "Ask.com will move up in ranks like crazy!" PR stuff. Ask will remain a small engine for very limited use, while other engines will grow along with non-English internet. Now they can be profitable at being small, but there is no significant growth prospect. And Wall Street loves mega-growth prospect...

Q: "who is the most intelligent person on Earth?"

The first reply:

"The human thinks he's the most intelligent being on earth but that is not entirely true"

I guess it is the correct answer after all.

Re:Ask.com - They track every click you make

You might as well stop using the web altogether then (or at least search engines). When it comes to search engines, tracking users behavior helps them to improve their results significantly. Human-based results are infinitely better than machine-generated results in the vast majority of cases, so tracking how users respond to results is something virtually every mainstream search engine is going to do. A company called Direct Hit Technologies pioneered popularity-based search engine results back around 1995 that were based entirely on the anonymous tracking of users search engine usage. They were eventually bought by Ask.com (still known as Ask Jeeves) in early 2000, before Ask bought Teoma.

There are a number of useful reasons for anonymously tracking user behavior in search engines. For example:

user A issues query Q. They visit website X, then a minute later website Y.
user B issues the same query. They also visit website X followed by website Y.

If this similar pattern occurs multiple times then it implies that the users found website Y better than website X as a result for query Q. The more you see this pattern the more you boost the ranking for website Y.

Another type of example:

user 1 issues the query "used cars" and eventually goes to website W.
user 2 issues the query "antique automobiles" and also eventually goes to website W.

If this pattern is repeated numerous times then the search engine can deduce that "used cars" is a good alternative to "antique automobiles" and vice versa. The search engine can combine the results of these queries to come up with better results and/or provide the queries as alternatives to the end user (if the search engine in question does provide alternative queries to try out).

Slightly more complex:

user C issues the query "auto mechanic". A minute or two later he issues the query "car parts".
user D issues the query "car parts". A minute or two later he issues the query "engine repair".

Again, if these patterns appear again and again over a period of time then the search engine can start equating the query "auto mechanic" with "engine repair". Once again the search engine can suggest one query in lieu of the other, or simply blend the results of the two queries together. If the search engine already knows that both "auto mechanic" and "engine repair" have website R as a search result then they may want to raise the relevency of that website for both queries, and as a result rank it higher in the results.

None of these sorts of ranking scenarios would be possible without minimal tracking of user interaction. It basically turns every user of the search engine into judges to help improve the results of search queries.

Re:Ask.com gaining conservative searchers

Your post has weasel words that make me doubt your conclusion: "many conservatives" (how many? which ones, specifically?) and "many have turned to ask.com" (same problem). People talk about "many" when they don't have any actual facts or figures, but they want to make a blanket generalization. "Many" is rhetorically equivalent to "one or more," but usually is used when the speaker wants the listener to believe he means "most" (which actually means something: 50% or more). So who cares if "one or more" conservatives stopped using Google? Is there any evidence at all of reduced traffice as a result?

If by "conservative news sources" you mean nonsense like Michelle Malkin, then good riddance to bad rubbish. What that she does isn't news, and she's not a reporter. She posts her opinions, backed by facts that are occassionally right and occassionally wrong - and she never publishes a correction, no matter how wrong she is. She's free to do this, of course, but what she does isn't news.

I am interested in what hate speech you believe exists on dailykos.com, and where you believe it's parallel to the frequent talk of "Leftards" and other hate speech I read on sites like The Jawa Report. You are also making a big assumption about the representativeness of the left-leaning sites you mention with respect to Google news overall, AND a big assumption about the quality of the reporting on these sites compared to the quality of the reporting on the (unnamed) conservative sites you mention. Factual accuracy is something that can be objectively evaluated, but not without specific references. Where do you find factual errors on daily kos, for instance?

Google is in Northern California, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Google is staffed by college graduates, many with advanced degrees, and these people are also more likely to be Democratic than not. Whatever your implication, Google probably couldn't exist if it insisted that 50% of its employees vote Republican. What you haven't demonstrated is that this pattern of private political contributions among Google employees translates to biased search results. Your use of the passive voice ("has been accused") itself suggests that you either don't know who the accusers are, or that the accusers lack any authority and that mentioning their names wouldn't help (or would even hurt) your argument.

Finally, your point about China is true. Google's dealings with China are, alas, no different from Yahoo's or Wal-Mart's, but they are all the same in this respect: they are irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Re:Ask.com gaining conservative searchers

The article talks about Google news which is not a search engine and thus it does not compete with Ask.com. Google news does not pretend to offer impartial results or to search the whole web.

I quickly scanned some of the alleged hate speech, I am not sure if it qualifies as hate speech, but I see how Google may be affraid that they would get too much complaints if it shows up on the front page of google news. Also I don't think dailykos or democratic underground contain "the same kind of hate speech".

I dont know how do you know about private political contributions of Google's employees. Arent those supposed to be private? But even if you are correct, what does that have to do with anything?

Google's agreement to censor results in China may be a legitimate reason to boycott but if one does that one should also boycott all the other large internet companies which do the same thing. Yahoo is much worse because they actually give Chinese authorities information that lands people in jail.

Re:Ask.com - They track every click you make

Google does the same exact thing. Even though I have Search History turned off, I searched for "paranoia." If you right-click on result 1 and click "Copy to clipboard," the raw URL comes out. If you look at the source, Google inserts tracking the second you left-click the link:

<a class=l href="http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/" onmousedown="return asq(event,this,'','','res','1','&sig2=QN3OZS8vdWbp J85DxPP1ZQ')">CDDA <b>Paranoia</b> Homepage</a>

More explanation available here [digitalpoint.com].

Re:YUCK!

>I would like to ask, is there any website UGLIER than ask.com?

http://games.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]