Ask (Again).com? (ask.com)

Member Name: f18nfz

Product:	ask.com
Date:	26/07/07 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Professional, good image search

Disadvantages: dull results layout, not as accurate as google

ASK.com is trying to be one of the great competetive search engines, like google, msn and yahoo.
Now taking up Tv Advertising its popularity seems to fluctuate however it is still not in the most visited websites (yahoo being first, google being second)..

Ask.com has developed a great new feature which allows you to preview the page before visiting it, this is unique to ask.com - however this is not available for all websites, but is fairly up to date.
Annoying thing is that they try to show off with these features but the key concept that they do not understand is speed. Yes the results page loads very fast, but not as fast as google and why does it have a special page effect (on loading the results the page appears slowly getting thicker from its translucent state)

The layout of the results is also not as attractive compared to google, it looks plain, with few colours, its nice that they put the search bar on the side like windows have it on their operating system search.
(i.e. when you search in windows not on their website)

Ask.com have a great domain name, its easy to remember, and their homepage looks fine, sort of but they need to re-design the search results page and maybe take up a system like adsense and go into advertising to become more popular.

The image search is good - they have search suggestions, they also offer related names on the left, and on the right (if its a famous name) they give blogs about that search, an encyclopedia profile, videos etc.
The image search also gives an option of searching adult only - so provides a fairly strict/secure search.
However the only categorising tools for images are size, file types and colours, - file types is good as i have not seen this before, the size option is also good.
Ask.com seem less greedy than google for money, they keep their sponsored results right at the bottom so they are unnoticeable!

A survey i did recently asked me to compare search engines, and i remember finding that msn.com had the best image search and were also excellent for web results, ( i was expecting google to be the best )
Ask.com came out alright for web results - and the preview tool was what scored points for me.
Im not sure its a good thing that askjeeves lost the butler, as that was ask.com's selling point, that made it unique at the time.
However the homepage does look rather neat and professional, however most people arent too concerned about the professional appearance they just want something attractive. - They should take up a scheme like Google where the word google on google.com's homepage changes according to a theme at that particular time like christmas or st patricks day.

ask.com produced 154 web results for a particular search compared to google that produced 786. ( the search was mopages - the name of my free website)
Does this result indicate that google is better? Well yes and no, yes google is better because they had my website come first - as its a more popular search, but both of them had a lot of irrelevent websites under the search for mopages, and most of the websites are dead links appart from mine ofcourse! So in this respect alot of results were not needed and i did find my site within the first page of ask.com's results (though not the correct homepage - i was looking to find www.mopages.co.nr/www.mopages.tk) neither of which were there.
Though i am annoyed that google say did you mean mocpages at the top!
mind you the 'did you mean' feature is very useful usually!

Ask.com like google has also got image, video, news, blog, shopping searches, it does not have book, map (etc.) searchings.

Summary: Ask.com has some great features that are unique to their site, google is still better in results