Ask.com: is there Room for Another Major Search Engine? - The Soul of a New Interface
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Ask.com’s engineers think its search tools are as good as Google’s, maybe even better. The company started working in earnest on the changes last fall, not long after Barry Diller acquired AskJeeves for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion last summer. One goal apparently was to give users easier access to those tools the search engine had constructed over the past three or four years. So where did Ask.com put them? Where else but in a “toolbox”?
Visitors to the Ask.com website see an interface as clean as Google’s with one small exception. Over on the right hand side is a rectangle that contains about ten different tools, labeled Images, News, Maps & Directories, Weather, Encyclopedia, and so on. Clicking on any tool changes the look of the interface, accessing the tool. For example, a click on Images takes you to Ask.com’s image search interface, which looks the same as the normal search box, but with examples of what you might get (thumbnails that are labeled). A search for Apple headquarters yields a variety of images; clicking on one leads to a split screen, with the image in the upper third and the page the image was taken from in the lower two thirds.
The maps & directories tool, to judge from Ask.com’s press release, is the company’s pride and joy. I hate to say it, but it’s very sluggish in comparison to Google and Mapquest; I found myself waiting tens of seconds every time the images had to be redrawn. And unlike Mapquest, it couldn’t tell me clearly that I would have to make a U-turn at one point in my directions.
The fact that it could give walking directions does differentiate it from other directional guides, and might be useful for people living in densely populated cities. It was also nice that I could drag and drop the location pins to a different address, and Ask.com automatically recalculated the directions. I don’t know whether any of the major search engines offer this feature yet. Additionally, if I wanted to, I could add a location, and Ask.com would have added the directions. This was handy when planning a route from work to my doctor’s office and back home.
Ask.com offered three views: street, mixed, and aerial. These looked about as you would have expected them. I liked the mixed view, which showed town names overlaid on the aerial view. The company makes much of their “Play directions” button, but I had trouble finding it (it isn’t labeled). And once I did find it, I wasn’t that impressed.
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