Is Ask the Next Big Search Engine? - Past, Present, and Future
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Ask was one of the most highly rated search engines in the late nineties. Its branding was great, and it consistently provided relevant results in an ergonomic (easy to view) format. But its complacency allowed a rash of competition to thrive, and finally Google ran away with the market.
Now it is repositioning itself to focus and bring its brand out. The strongest point in its favor currently may be the fickleness of the people who use search engines; in their efforts to get the results they want, web surfers use all kinds of search engines, and are also very quick to discard a search engine if they discover that the results presented to them are irrelevant. I have found myself using Excite, Lycos, Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo at the same time while searching for particular or hard to find material/information. This same fickleness led to Ask losing its audience, as better branded and more effective search engines came out, but if it consistently started giving results which can be found nowhere else, and showed itself to be a unique and user friendly search engine, Ask could become bigger than it ever was.
Unique Listings?
If there is anything Ask is currently guilty of, it is that it doesn't give results which are unique to its own search engine. The listings on its SERPs are similar to pages found on other top search engines, and are becoming vaguely similar to results found on Yahoo, while also listing content found on Google. Is this good or is this bad?
Many people searching are not really concerned about the uniqueness of the listings; they want effective SERPs, and a listing that combines the best of Yahoo and Google can be called "the best of both worlds." Combining its Teoma search engine technology, which focuses on social search, with its smart search technology and its Expertrank algorithm, Ask is currently the best site for experts. If you are a researcher or a graduate student, or writing a scientific paper, and you want to search online, Ask is the search engine of choice.
Think about it. Google lists pages based on its Pagerank algorithm; it therefore gives you the page with the most related site links as the first listing, which will probably be a business site. Ask actually gives you the site which other sites that offer the same content link to, so it gives content rich and highly relevant sites as its first set of listings, instead of highly optimized but otherwise content empty business sites. Thus Ask is unique in that its SERPs are differently arranged (and force website owners to optimize for it differently).
Ask also offers unique listings on its Blog and Feed search, which is its tool for search enthusiasts to explore the blogosphere and not fear being bombarded with low quality blogs.
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