The New ask.com
The Ask Jeeves search engine (ask.com) has been one of the minor search players for years. But they have quietly been broadening their search-related holdings. Now they have re-launched as ask.com, dropping Jeeves, which I think is a good branding move.
Ask.com has pretty good underlying search technology, having bought Teoma.com in 2001. They also purchased the desktop search company Tukaroo and Interactive Search Holdings which owned Excite, My Way, My Search, and iWon, and finally, they acquired blog feed aggregator and search engine Bloglines. So, Ask now has assembled a reasonable portfolio of search properties.
The main search site, ask.com, has a number of nice features, as well as some rough edges. For instance, you can see a small graphic preview of a page if you hover over the binocular icons next to a result (cute, but I don't think very useful). You can save results and organize them and add tags to results you saved (though the UI to manage and tag saved results is a bit clunky and old-school). They need to fix some rough edges, for instance, URLs they display are not as nice as Google and Yahoo's (try the query: sf giants) because they are not handling redirects as well as Yahoo and Google. They do, however, provide query suggestions for narrowing and expanding your search, as well as related queries. And, they've added special-case results at the top for specific types of queries (similar to what Google does for airline flights). For example, type the query: weather san francisco and you'll get the weather at the top. Type in a major sports team such as Pittsburgh Pirates and you'll get links to scores, schedule, stats, and more. Wikipedia hits are also shown right at the top. All in all, it's good to see some healthy competition in search.
Ask.com has pretty good underlying search technology, having bought Teoma.com in 2001. They also purchased the desktop search company Tukaroo and Interactive Search Holdings which owned Excite, My Way, My Search, and iWon, and finally, they acquired blog feed aggregator and search engine Bloglines. So, Ask now has assembled a reasonable portfolio of search properties.
The main search site, ask.com, has a number of nice features, as well as some rough edges. For instance, you can see a small graphic preview of a page if you hover over the binocular icons next to a result (cute, but I don't think very useful). You can save results and organize them and add tags to results you saved (though the UI to manage and tag saved results is a bit clunky and old-school). They need to fix some rough edges, for instance, URLs they display are not as nice as Google and Yahoo's (try the query: sf giants) because they are not handling redirects as well as Yahoo and Google. They do, however, provide query suggestions for narrowing and expanding your search, as well as related queries. And, they've added special-case results at the top for specific types of queries (similar to what Google does for airline flights). For example, type the query: weather san francisco and you'll get the weather at the top. Type in a major sports team such as Pittsburgh Pirates and you'll get links to scores, schedule, stats, and more. Wikipedia hits are also shown right at the top. All in all, it's good to see some healthy competition in search.
posted by jasonz at
12:22 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home