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Ask.com, still losing market share to Google and Yahoo, revamps its web site yet again

Internet search engine Ask.com has revamped its web site for the third time since 2005 in another effort to increase its market share against Google and Yahoo.

"On average, it takes consumers three clicks to find what they are searching for online.  Ask.com's goal is to reduce this to one click of the search box," Ask.com CEO Jim Safka said in a statement published on the company's web site.

The Oakland, California-based company changed its search algorithm so searches rely more on higher-volume search categories and now offers more links on the results page.  The number of sites Ask.com uses to index content has also been greatly increased by engineers.

Since Safka joined the company in January, he has helped steer Ask.com to work more on speed and relevance of search results.

Ars Technica's David Chartier revealed semantic searching on Ask.com has been greatly improved and in some cases proved to be more helpful than Google and Yahoo.  When he used "What causes headaches?" and "What is a good credit score?", he found "strong results, especially when compared to search giants like Google and Yahoo."

"In addition to scraping sentence fragments for the description of a search result, though, Ask.com now provides complete snippets of information for many natural-language queries as part of a new technology dubbed DAFS, or Direct Answers From Search. The aforementioned headache question returns everything from a photo and single-sentence explanation from Healthline.com, to a complete quote that begins:  'Lots of different things can bring on headaches.  Most headaches are related to:  stress, dehydration...'"

Along with the DAFS, the DADS, or Direct Answers from Databases, and AnswerFarm will help improve users' search experiences through the site.  DADS is focused on schedule-based results, and can be implemented when a user searches for a TV listing time for a popular television show.

AnswerFarm relies on Yahoo Answers, WebMD, MetaFilter, and other user-supplied answer web sites.

Google has 56.5 percent of all searches in the United States, with Yahoo trailing with 23.3 percent, and Microsoft rounding out the top three with 11.3 percent, comScore research numbers indicate.  Ask.com has just 4.5 percent of the market.

Even with the improved search results, Ask.com obviously faces an uphill battle in its latest attempt to steal global market share away from Google and Yahoo.  The company is focused solely on enhancing its search engine and not fighting takeovers or mapping the moon -- a stab at Yahoo and Google -- and hopes its sole dedication to one task will help draw in users.


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Live Search #3?
By Spivonious on 10/8/2008 9:28:04 AM , Rating: 2
I'm sure the only reason for that is because it's the default search engine for IE7. I like Microsoft, so I gave Live Search a chance, and after a month I just had to go back to Google. Live Search routinely returned results that had little to do with the query I had typed.




RE: Live Search #3?
By mmntech on 10/8/2008 9:39:09 AM , Rating: 2
That's the reason Google is on top. It's simple to use with its no frills interface and its searches are pretty reliable compared to the competition. The other search engine providers are too dumb to realize that, including Microsoft.

In the words of Kyle. " Ask Jeeves? Nobody uses Ask Jeeves! Just Google-search it!"


RE: Live Search #3?
By Lifted on 10/8/2008 12:39:40 PM , Rating: 2
What is the name of that new search engine all the news sites made a big stink about a few months ago? Does it still exist?


RE: Live Search #3?
By Bainne on 10/8/2008 12:55:06 PM , Rating: 3
The one by ex google employees?
It was Cuil
And its not that great.

Google is still number 1, but I also use SearchMe, which display full pages graphically. Makes it easy to scan to find pages that look relevant. You can often tell a lot about the website just from a small snapshot.


RE: Live Search #3?
By Mitch101 on 10/8/2008 3:41:20 PM , Rating: 2
Cuil is worth watching though. Lately they have been hammering one of my sites cataloging the information. Not sure what will come from it but time will tell. I would believe they just need some time to catalog more of what is out there.

AltaVista has been showing up more and more in searches on my site. Not sure if they changed something, more people are going old skool, or they if my site wasnt cataloged with them before. I suspect they changed something because after all if no one is using your search engine then it must need improvement.

Ask isn't bad but for some reason I just don't remember to use it.


RE: Live Search #3?
By iFX on 10/8/2008 11:22:32 PM , Rating: 2
I like Cuil because of their privacy policy which Google does not seem to have.

From Cuil web site:
quote:
Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.


That to me means it's worth using over Google.


RE: Live Search #3?
By poundsmack on 10/8/2008 12:53:18 PM , Rating: 1
one of the primary reasons that google is number 1 is they have good hardware OEM and software OEM connection. how many new desktops (dell, hp, others) come witht he google deskbar and IE toolbar pre installed causing google to be your default search engine? Dell (last i saw the number) the #1 pc seller, have google as its dell startpage seach egine, and most novice users never change that page.

google is also the firefox start page broswer as well as (sadly) Opera's search bar broswer (though they have ask as the default on the spead dial page, that used ot be yahoo and i am really upset it was taken out as the default.

so all of these (with the exception of mozilla) used to use yahoo. one of the few yahoo loyalists is OpenDNS ( http://guide.opendns.com/ ) whos search is powerd by yahoo.

yahoo's release of BOSS ( http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ ) will hopefully help them out.

I like the new Ask though, I like what they have done with it, all the custimizations. how you can make your start page in ask just the way you want it incuding backgrounds, all in all very well done.

what I wish ask had (and yahoo for that matter) was a search widget that could be embedded into sites like Quintura does it, as seen here ( http://affiliates.quintura.com/embed_and_invite/?P... )

keep up the good work ask, google (while very good) is vastly over rated. I would take Ask or Yahoo any day of the week


RE: Live Search #3?
By omnicronx on 10/8/2008 1:33:16 PM , Rating: 3
I think we all just got tired of asking if Jeeves was gay.. and getting the "I prefer jovial" response..


Been done
By Hieyeck on 10/8/2008 8:26:48 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
"On average, it takes consumers three clicks to find what they are searching for online. Ask.com's goal is to reduce this to one click of the search box,"
It's called the "I'm feeling lucky" button.




RE: Been done
By BarkHumbug on 10/8/2008 11:08:30 AM , Rating: 1
Do you, punk?


Off Topic But...
By kelmon on 10/8/2008 9:21:36 AM , Rating: 2
...just bring back Jeeves, you miserable bastards. I don't think this would actually bring more customers to Ask.com but at least it gives the service some character.




I used to use Teoma...
By Motoman on 10/8/2008 9:29:25 AM , Rating: 2
...until it got eaten by Ask. Now I use neither.




By BigToque on 10/8/2008 11:14:22 AM , Rating: 2
The biggest problem that I find is that there is difference between the content that you are searching for and the way people are trying to search for it (such as "Credit" being a keyword and people searching for "What is a good credit rating?".

Right now, most search engines use meta tags and keep copies of sites and try to pull the sites with as much relevent meta data. Obviously this pulls sites which might be relevent to you, but it may also pull irrelevent results because the author filled his page with keywords hidden in the HTML to get higher on the results page.

I think that the search engines need to find a better way to provide results, but I also think that authors need to make their websites a little easier to find. Perhaps if they are writing a page on "what determines good credit", they might include strings of text ("What determines good credit?" in the code that would make it easy for a search engine to pick out.

Fortunately I'm pretty good at finding the things that I need, but there is the odd time where I just dont know what to search for and end up attempting a real question and hoping that some site has a topic titled exactly what I'm looking for.




"Vista runs on Atom ... It's just no one uses it". -- Intel CEO Paul Otellini









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