Is Ask the Next Big Search Engine? - Poor Branding
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Another biggie on Ask's list of sins is bad branding. Until recently, when it actively stopped branding as askjeeves.com, it was the main focus of their branding efforts. But Askjeeves is hard to spell and confusing to perceive. Digging into search engine databases, you will notice that searches for Askjeeves give 21 wrong spellings for every fifty spellings. And people seem not to have caught on that Askjeeves is now Ask.com. According to Search Engine Optimization 101, the most common misspellings for "Jeeves" are: jeves, geeves, jeevs, jeaves, jeeve, jevves, jeebs, geves, jeevees, reeves, jeevers, jives, jevess, jevs, and jeebes.
Over eight years of branding as Askjeeves is still working against the search engine. It will take some serious publicity if Ask want to change its name perception in the minds of search engine users. And it is in the place of publicity that Ask faces their final challenge.
Poor Publicity
Perhaps it is because Ask is based in Britain, or maybe Jeeves is too discreet, but Ask does not attract or create the kind of publicity one hears about concerning the other search engines. The publicity stunts that Google does, through its constant reinvention of its homepage to reflect current themes (which Yahoo has begun to imitate) and Google's April Fool stunts, and of course its constantly-in-beta product releases, guarantee Google is constantly in the news. If Ask cannot do this, it will definitely spell against the company since publicity is essential on the Internet. Cyberbuzz is the one way to get billions of dollars worth of free advertising. Ask doesn't have enough of it right now.
Riding the Future
Ask is dually positioned with Yahoo to ride the new wave of search, social search. Yahoo is betting its future on personalized search and social search. Ask entered the social search scene slightly earlier than Yahoo, via its purchase of Teoma in 2001. Teoma (and therefore Ask) works by indexing online communities and "expert sites" and by ranking sites based on the number of similar content pages that link to that site. This is based on "Subject Specific Popularity" technology that seeks to return the most relevant results to the search engine user. Teoma allows the user to refine search listings to the most informative and authoritative sites on the topic for which he is searching.
Extreme Customer Focusing
Ask also has the advantage of being user focused. Their focus is not their monetary bottom line, but rather the customer's search experience (this is unlike Yahoo, who seems intent on bankrupting website users via its PFI/PPC program). This point is reflected in Ask's in depth crawling of all submitted sites. Websites can submit multiple URLs to Ask for free through www.ask.ineedhits.com. This is separate from Ask's paid database listing. This allows a large number of websites to enable Ask to search and index their sites.
Combine this with the ability of Ask to understand search queries delivered in phrase or question form, and this makes Ask the most user friendly search engine around. Its publicized aim is to understand the user's query perfectly, no matter how it is phrased. Ask also has a spell check function on its search bar, so as to correct mistyped search queries. Its dedication to improving the search experience (apart from search results) and its use of new technologies to improve its search results makes it a world class site with a world class search experience.
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