I hadn’t visited Ask in a while, so before searching I reacquainted myself with some of its options. I was delighted to discover the new skins option. You wouldn’t think having a different background could matter, but somehow it does make a difference, at least in frame of mind. Here’s the default home page (cropped and shrunk to fit), with the arrow clicked so you can see all the specialized search options:
If you’ve read other reviews, you’ve probably seen the polka dot skin. Here’s a different one:
There are plenty more, and eventually users will be able to upload their own custom skins. Of course, search is a lot more than just a pretty face, so naturally I was eager to get started. I thought I’d start off with one of my favorite bands, which will no doubt show my age: the Beach Boys. I noticed something very interesting before I even hit the search button:
Having search suggestions listed like that is a very nice touch; it’s even nicer that there’s a very obvious link that lets you disable that feature if it gets annoying. Google doesn’t make any suggestions until after you click. I particularly like this assortment of suggestions, since it does a good job of covering the various reasons someone who had at least briefly encountered the Beach Boys might be searching for them online.
But never mind the suggestions (despite how tempting some of them looked); I wanted to go ahead with my search as it was. I don’t mean to sound like a PR person, but the results were jaw-dropping. I’m going to apologize in advance for this cropped and resized image, because I already know there is no way it will do justice to the actual results.
This is Ask’s three-panel interface in action. As I mentioned in the previous section, the first panel shows you ways you can adjust your search, the second panel shows you what might be considered traditional results, while the third panel shows you items to supplement those results: images, music tracks, etc. I’ll be taking a closer look at these panels in the next section.
Search Engine News 
