Ask.Com's New Look Competes Well With Google

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Ask Jeeves has been overhauled and renamed Ask.com. The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg tested the new site against Google and found that Ask.com holds its own and even beats the search champ in some cases. 'It has some very nice features Google lacks, including previews of the sites it finds, an easy way to narrow or broaden your search results, and frequent top-of-the-screen answers that lead you directly to core information,' Mossberg writes."

Website time-lapse

[brejc8]

I made some nice animations [brej.org] of the way the some sites have changed their layout (google, ask and altavista). Both altavista and ask are turning more and more google like.

not about "quality" per se

[Douglas Simmons]

Though a competitor may try to make advances against google with revampments, Google's already got the golden brand and in this industry the guy who's at the top stays there as people feel more comfortable using what everyone else uses ... what's established. They're not going anywhere, move along.

Overall I am impressed

[liliafan]

It seems like ask has come a long way, the binoculars feature is actually really smooth, I was expecting a slow loading feature when I read the article but I was suprised.

One thing I am not so keen on is the adverts displayed at the top of the page, something you see all over the place now, but also at the bottom of the page, meaning, I had to view them twice, I imagine for the advertisers this is a major benefit but to me the user it is an annoyance to have to scroll further to view the next page of results.

Another minor annoyance when you make a search you can go to settings but then to get back to your results you have to click the back button or make a change and save the settings there is no cancel and the top links to images, news, shopping and more options disappear from the top.

Minor annoyances aside though it looks like ask.com has taken a page from the google book of search engines and come up with a reasonably fast (feels a little slower than google), minimalist site with nice features, hopefully they will get the recognition they deserve for a job well done.

I like it...

[Otter]

Like with most "natural language" search hype, I always found that the only thing Ask Jeeves seemed to do effectively was ignore the context and pick out keywords. That's probably genuinely useful for a lot of users, but if you know how to use keywords, there's no advantage.

But the new Ask.com site is the first real advance in web search since the original Google came out. My one gripe is that their banner ads on other sites (with the Google results whooshing by in a blur) are really annoying.

Ask.com Maps and Directions

[Lord Satri]

I took a look at TFA. Is it me or they don't discuss this new important feature: Ask.com Maps & Directions [ask.com].

works better than Google on at least one search

[aeoo]

I can confirm that it works better than Google on at least one search. I was looking for a friend's email just yesterday and I spent about 20 minutes with Google and got nowhere. With ask.com I got my answer on the first link!

ask.com is definitely going to be something I will consider using.

Unfortunately I can't post my search string, because it's personal, but I'll mention that it's three words: first two are my friend's nickname and the third ward is his first real name. My friend has a very unique nickname when you put two words together, but both words are very very common individually. I'm hoping some others will post some detailed results.

Re:Poor Jeeves...

[PoitNarf]

I found the ask.com cover story for Jeeves disappearance. I'm not buying it!

http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/jeeveshasretired.h tml [ask.com]

http://blog.ask.com/2006/02/thanks_jeeves.html [ask.com]

Why is "ask.com" a competitor? (Uses Google ads!)

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Why is "ask.com" considered a competitor? After all, "ask.com" still serves Google Ads. (How do I know? My ads are served on ask.com and I know I only bought them through Google...)

Re:For the lazy

[aeoo]

Try it. It beat the crap out of Google on a very difficult search for me. But that's just one search and it's just me. But from what it looks like so far, it's definitely doing fine on the results so far. Give it a shot and let us know.

I'm hoping someone will post some more detailed research on the actual search results. :)

Re:Website time-lapse

[brejc8]

I looked at altavista for the first time in years and noticed it being very google like and so I thought it would be nice to see how and why it changed. The script was pretty simple to make but took a while to run (overnight for each one). I like doing stuff like this as it improves my skills in different languages (in this case it was perl) and I thought learning a lot of languages might be an idea before writing my own.

Re:They need to do a lot better than Google...

[ThePhilips]

Google people are clever.

Many people have noticed their approach. First they provided fast search. Then they have provided more results. Then have started filtering results to artificially guess what you really want. Then have introduced "hacks" (and in fact they are still introducing them) for most of the often searched items.

E.g. "man ifconfig" as well as "msdn CreateWindow" on Google do what I want and expect from them - fetching me pages with technical documentation. When I search in Germany "Berlin Muenchen" Google gives me option to jump to Bahn.de and look for train connections between the two cities. Weather? - he you go. Movies? - you are welcome. Shopping? - here it is. And so on. (*)

Google is cool because they always tried to bring better results for every search. And they did NOT stuck with "only search" moto like for example Altavista did many years ago. People search for various kinds of information - you can NOT optimize in general - but you can in particular. And Google optimizes lots of lots of the particular cases. That's why I like Google.

That process takes time. And of course, it requires the feat now *very* UNpopular across the IT industry: listening to your users.

Good Luck Ask.com - Google needs some healthy competition ;-)

(*) I suspect Google constantly analizes what people look for and which results they click on. That way they can guess in advance what majority of users expects from the search.

Re:For the lazy

[hackstraw]

Unfortunately, I use Google because I like the results it provides.

What else is there?

With google I can do:

my doctor's last name my_city, state

Hit return, and at the top of the page there is the phone number to call. If only the number was hooked into an autodialer, when that comes, it will be cool.

Google has usenet searches.

Google has news searches (I get confused sometimes between news.google.com and groups.google.com, but...)

Google has search by domain searches. Very useful to do .edu or .org or whatever to eliminate the .com domains who are trying to sell me crap.

Google is instantaneous. ask.com is slow right now.

Google has image searches.

Google has video searches.

Google will have music searches.

Google...

Yes, I'm a happy user. Thanks for Google having the best real estate on the web, and those greedy link parking whores that pay for my searching capabilities. Not to mention that its refreshing that I can buy ANYTHING that I search for at eBay while I'm at it. Very convenient.

Re: Ask Maps vs Google Maps

[RonDiggity]

Ask actually correctly places Playa Vista (a relatively new neighborhood in Los Angeles) [ask.com], whereas on Google simply points at downtown LA [google.com].