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?

[mdecarle]

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

Re:Lack of ads counts most?

[BluhDeBluh]

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.

Deceptive article...

[cswiger2005]

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.

Re:What about punctuation?

[ferd_farkle]

"just about worthless" ??

The search terms 'latex asterisk circle' gave this as 2nd result:

A Guide to LaTeX
\circle{d} draw circle of diameter d; * form draws solid disk \oval{x ... Note that when you put the asterisk '*' in front of % the text, that the section, ...
www.astro.rug.nl/~kuijken/latex.html - 36k - Cached - Similar pages

  - One needn't even follow the link. Google is your friend.

Re:Deceptive article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite sure how accurate addresses in Domain registrants are ... but 701 First Ave, Sunnyvale Ca is Yahoo!s corporate headquarters.

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

[generic-man]

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:Full-blown...

[AleFeanor]

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.

Sometimes I use START http://start.csail.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] when I have a question like "what's the biggest country in Europe" or "What's the distance between Buenos Aires and Rosario"

I miss teoma.com

[OrangeTide]

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.