Ask Looks at Search in 3D - Three Panels, (Almost) No Ads
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Here’s the first panel from my search. I couldn’t resist clicking on one of the “more” links to show you once again how Ask presents additional information:
As you can see, you can get much more focused, or step back, or take a look at related bands or band members even if you don’t click to see more. What appears in that left panel will depend entirely on your search. You won’t always get related names, for instance; I did when I tried out a search for “juggling,” but not for “bobbin lace,” which makes perfect sense.
Now let’s take a look at the middle panel. The results look traditional, but I’m going to hover over the binoculars so you can see what they do:
Ask has beefed up its binoculars. You get a preview of the site, an idea of how large it is, how long it would take to download with a 56k setup, and whether you need any plug-ins to see the site properly (as noted, the site I hovered over uses Flash). Now you’ll also see a little green plus sign inside what looks like a tiny document to the right of this entry. Clicking on that saves the link to My Stuff, Ask’s version of a personalized search history (you need an account for that of course).
As it turns out, I didn’t see any ads in this section for this search. This doesn’t mean that Ask is going completely without ads! They do show up in other searches. For example, when I did a search on Tiger Woods, three sponsored listings showed below the first link; after that, there was a larger grouping of sponsored listings after the tenth link. It’s worth noting, however, that you still get 10 organic results (or however many you’ve set Ask to show you) regardless of the number of ads. Sponsored links are visibly different, showing up in a light yellow box. Here’s a set from the Tiger Woods results:
One reviewer accused Ask of using the lightest possible shade of yellow without being white for the background of sponsored links, but it really didn’t seem that difficult to me to differentiate it from the white background.
Here is the third panel, or what I could fit into one image. I could scroll down for more options:
The third panel lays out images, music tracks, an entry from Wikipedia, and video (below the screen shot area). This time when you click on the “more” link it takes you to the database from which the information was drawn. Of course, what turns up in the third panel will also depend on your search query; for “bobbin lace” I didn’t get any videos, but I did get blog entries. And for at least one search – search engine optimization – that third panel didn’t even appear at all.
Ask still needs to work on its results. As other reviewers have noted, Google does just as good a job in many cases, and a much better one for some searches. For the Beach Boys results, for example, Google did about as good a job when compared with the middle section of Ask’s results. But I must admit that I appreciated seeing the ways I could adjust my search close at hand without having to scroll down for them (as I did for Google), and seeing those other resources on the right side. I could get used to a search engine that gives me that kind of help and content.
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