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."

Lack of ads counts most?

[MarkByers]

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.

"Quick Facts from Wikipedia" ???

[RobotRunAmok]

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" ???

[greenhollow]

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?

[jacoplane]

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.

Re:"Quick Facts from Wikipedia" ???

[RobotRunAmok]

You cannot make serious decisions about anything unless you do in depth research and take all sides into consideration.

Correct.

This is the same as trusting the newspapers, tv sound bytes and what celebrities say.

Incorrect. When a contributor to Wikipedia risks losing his principal source of income because what she has written in an article is wrong, then that contributor *begins* to approach equal standing with the professional journalists, writers, researchers, and editors of the "traditional" media and encyclopedias.

I am not saying that the Wikipedia Army and Pajama Nation do not have their useful place here in the early part of the 21st Century -- they surely do -- but being suppliers of "quick facts" ain't it.

Full-blown...

[suv4x4]

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.

Re:"Quick Facts from Wikipedia" ???

[zenyu]

Incorrect. When a contributor to Wikipedia risks losing his principal source of income because what she has written in an article is wrong, then that contributor *begins* to approach equal standing with the professional journalists, writers, researchers, and editors of the "traditional" media and encyclopedias.


Hehe, I guess you haven't read a newspaper in the last 300 years, huh?

The last time I picked up a NYT there were about two clear misstatements of facts or worse for every one essentially correct statement.

There is a reason it's called the first draft of history.

The problem with your thinking is that while professional journalist do have money as a motivator they must also produce "content" or lose that income. Since they only get caught after the newspaper gets thousands of complaint letters, the journalist is only forced to fact check stories on controversial topics. Everything else he writes displays the sorry state of our high schools, which graduate these future workers into journalism schools to produce the army of hacks that edit our nation's press releases for brevity for publication in our newspapers.

The average wikipedian is not only immeasurably better educated than our best journalists, but they are also not under the deadline pressure and threat of job loss that forces the journalist to write total schlock on a regular basis. Of course I grant more credence to a peer reviewed article in a serious journal than to a wikipedia article, but the wikipedia has a hell of a lot more accuracy than any daily newspaper!

Note: I say daily newspaper because I have some faith in the Economist and other weeklies. While the Economist is often laughably off, say when the story is on a continent where they have few reporters or on stories where their idealogical beliefs strongly contradict the facts, most articles seem to have had a serious minded fact checker or an editor give them a quick read.

Re:Ask.com gaining conservative searchers

[saihung]

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.