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June 4, 2007

Major Relaunch For Ask: Ask3D

Michael Arrington

58 comments »

Forget the advertising campaign debacle: There is some real news about Ask.com tonight.

The search engine, which is currently the fourth most used search service, is publicly re-launching tonight around 9 PM PST. You won’t see this when visiting the site: The home page and all results pages have been significantly overhauled and a ton of new features and resources have been added. The company has been testing the changes with a small sample group since late last year.

At the core of the changes is a move towards simplicity, though, which may count for more than the other changes. There is a significantly less cluttered home page with lots of white space. Users can skin that page with a number of options by clicking on “skins” below the search box (my favorite is “azul” if you have a wide enough screen - this is the image at the top of this post). Ask says that users will also be able to upload their own images within a month or so. Google recently started offering users the ability to personalize the home page as well.

The search results themselves are highly customized depending on what type of search is being conducted. Search for a music artist and see images of the artist along with clips from tracks via iLike in the right sidebar (Ask’s sister company, TicketMaster, recently invested in iLike). Search for a city and get different results in the sidebar - a map, weather information, the current time, photos and wikipedia information.

Ask also has a preview feature for search results - click on the binoculars next to a result and a window pops up to view the page. Ask will also tell you the weight of the page, whether it uses Flash or other plugins, and other data.

There are literally dozens of other features as well. Results can be bookmarked by clicking on the “+” icon to the right of each result, for example. Click on advanced search options and it bring it right into the page instead of redirecting like other search engines. And my personal favorite: the Ask logo and header is off to the left, meaning far more results are loaded onto each results page.

The left sidebar contains options to narrow or expand the search, which Ask CEO Jim Lanzone says are clicked on very often to help people find the right query.

Overall this is an excellent upgrade, and it may help Ask grab a market share point or two against the competition. If every 1% of the search market is worth $1 billion or more, then this investment will certainly pay off.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. EP

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

    This is why competition is so great, it really lights a fire under everyones nose. Hopefully everyone in the space will keep innovating and trying new things, and eventually someone will change the search paradigm again and make all of our lives that much better.

    Congrats to ask.com for some cool features

  2. Duncan Riley

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:15 pm

    It’s now live. Wow, smooth results, beautiful layout, now this is the stuff they should be including in the advertising :-)

  3. Gadgetize

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:26 pm

    Sweet to see anything change in this area. I’m always rooting for Ask, but that algorithm stuff was pretty rough. This is nice news.

    They still have some of the worst converting PPC traffic I’ve ever had the misfortune of running across, but one thing at a time.

  4. az1324

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:28 pm

    This must be the work of the algorithm.

  5. Aziz Rehmatullah

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:39 pm

    Nice! Even the results seem to be better.

    The only thing I don’t like about the search results is that they maintain no continuity in theme/layout with the home page, which kind of doesnt gel too well with the eye. Individually, both layouts are good!

  6. Darin

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

    Looks good to me … Ask.Com is worth a look for all you Search Engine Marketeers out there!

    Darin
    http://www.darin.cc

  7. Who cares...

    June 4th, 2007 at 9:57 pm

    Check out chicken men standing and watching group of college chick turn into WWE circus clowns. Very sick!!!

    http://pandachute.com/videos/c.....reet_brawl

  8. Kevin

    June 4th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

    Wow, I was not expecting that. Fantastic work by the Ask team. Be sure to check out the local search/map feature…very impressive.

  9. carl lu

    June 4th, 2007 at 10:06 pm

    the web site still sucks

  10. whoopee

    June 4th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

    ask is not going to grab 1% market share.

    if you believe current trends will continue, then everyone but google will continue to lose market share in search.

    ask is just a later-day lycos or infoseek. yes, the site works, but this market has no use for also-rans. feast or famine.

  11. Question

    June 4th, 2007 at 10:10 pm

    Why do they call it Ask3D? Am I missing something?

  12. Snicker

    June 4th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    if you believe current trends will continue, then everyone but google will continue to lose market share in search.

    Hi, Larry! Or is it Sergei?

  13. Yakov

    June 4th, 2007 at 11:32 pm

    Their new UI is slick and a set of results is loaded quite fast, a bit disorienting, though, too many of everything on the screen, and how you can easily refine and go back?

  14. Gomzi

    June 4th, 2007 at 11:33 pm

    Always nice to see something new coming up.

    Ask seems to have done a lot of work but after having a look, I guess I will stick with google.

  15. David Ulevtch

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:10 am

    Damn, this *feels* pretty good. And the results seem pretty damn good too.

    I’ve set it as my homepage, we’ll see how long it works out.

  16. Lars Fischer

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:31 am

    I think I’ll actually use this, it looks great.

  17. Andreas Stephan

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:34 am

    Like it at lot. Especially the new search results page. Nicely integrated results, easy to narrow down… suggestions that make sense (tried seaching for “G8″) - sweet!
    The international versions have not been updated yet. Although I can access the US site, when I try to change the skin it gets me right back to the plain old German version. Guess that will be fixed in a few days.

  18. Michael

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:01 am

    I think that the new ask.com looks really cool, I will not replace google.com for me but it is getting there. I definitely wouldn’t mind looking at a beautiful web page when I’m doing my very boring internet searches.

  19. SELaplana

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:17 am

    well, what’s the point of making the page interesting if the search result is not. I still want to use Yahoo! or Google rather than this.

  20. Neil

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:20 am

    nice try, but Ask just doesn’t have my trust. Don’t know why, it just doesn’t - therefore I don’t trust the results period.

    I’m gonna stick with Google for English language searches (P.S. Google suck Russia where you think they’ed be strong right?)

  21. fluencev

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:28 am

    i will use it for my homepage!
    (*^__^*)

  22. Robert

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:45 am

    I am glad to know so many people like our new UI, and I believe we need to do more, esp. in the back end to make it even better.

  23. Antonk

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:51 am

    I like it more and more! So, the results seem to be better. Soon ASK.com will be #1 )))

  24. Tim

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:49 am

    Still, google gives much better results when your looking something from other languages than english. Even if I searched for my own name, it gave almost nothing, whereas google gives at least 2 pages correct results.

  25. micfo

    June 5th, 2007 at 4:00 am

    Change is always good but they should make sure that it should be user friendly too.

  26. Rudi

    June 5th, 2007 at 4:23 am

    do you know anything about South Africa and the South African Stock Market?

    http://bluvestments.blogspot.com/

  27. Thad

    June 5th, 2007 at 5:28 am

    I LOVE IT!!! This is the best SERP I’ve seen yet. Really makes Ask shine. I’ve always rooted for Ask, so great job! This should make google feel ashamed of all that hype around univ search. Big Yawn! BTW, I like the polka dots.

  28. jared

    June 5th, 2007 at 5:49 am

    like their customizable theme front page

  29. Snatch

    June 5th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    Very nice redesign.. but as I’m in the UK I got redirected to their UK based site and it still hasn’t updated to the new Ask3D feature set.

    http://uk.ask.com/?o=312

    I managed to see the new layout via clicking the US site link on the bottom of the UK page. Bugs me when companies update the US first for honestly no particularly good reason.

    Anyways I love the redesign. Kudos.

  30. Owen

    June 5th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    Thanks Snatch .. was trying to figure out why it looked the same to me ;)

  31. Concrete Stain

    June 5th, 2007 at 7:09 am

    It does look good / A lot better than yahoo -

    - then again I hope it fails as i can’t optimize for it :)

    -Later,RB

  32. david8

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:34 am

    Remind me again why I want sponsored results mixed in with my search results. I don’t. I’ll stick with google, thanks. I prefer substance over dubious style.

  33. steven

    June 5th, 2007 at 9:11 am

    I think the homepage looks good, and the results are quite decent. The thing that ruins it for me are the distracting sidebars on each side of the page for search results. ASK.COM - you need to get simpler if you want to compete with google, the page just looks to spammy for me and distracts from the results. One sidebar would be ok but 2 is ridiculous.

  34. PT

    June 5th, 2007 at 9:36 am

    BusinessWeek copied this article but is censoring any negative comments about ask.com.

    Put businessweek.com in your hosts file and send it to localhost.

  35. Sameer

    June 5th, 2007 at 9:48 am

    Its clear that Ask went back to the drawing board and really thought about what comprehensive results really means. The overall deisgn is also very inviting. Kudos to the Ask team.

  36. mcy_999

    June 5th, 2007 at 10:25 am

    Outstanding! The result page is much more robust comparing to competitors. I specially like the Ask Map&Directions, AskCity and Ask Mobile. The usability of those modules is unmatched.

  37. børge

    June 5th, 2007 at 11:16 am

    The new front page looks beautiful!

    But how is it possible to find just one image result when searching for “lolcats”?

  38. Sam Davyson

    June 5th, 2007 at 11:22 am

    I don’t know how many people they expect to switch… but for real people Googling = Searching the internet. Fin. Ask is not involved.

  39. stuart

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

    does anyone know how to get the azul skin as Michael did in his report? When I use azul, it’s larger — I like the azul skin with the bench smaller and below the search field.

  40. stuart

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:56 pm

    Forget it… i missed “if your screen is wide enough”

    http://www.interbasket.net

  41. PT

    June 5th, 2007 at 7:33 pm

    What BusinessWeek is censoring, for some unknown reason:

    I searched for ask3d on ask.com and it gave me a bunch of leetspeak-containing sites.

    I searched for it on google.com and got relevant articles on Ask3D.

    Ironic and telling.

  42. Tony Chen

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:04 pm

    All these things are nice. But what about the real algorithm. Does it at least match Google?

  43. Rajesh Anandakrishnan

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:22 pm

    Yea Ask.com looks pretty cool with the new UI. even Ask maps rocks. I was excited by seeing ask 3d. After 15 minutes i had to search something and I used google. It has gone to subconcious and google is becoming a religion.

    http://www.suggestusability.com

  44. Boris Epstein

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    I like the innovation going on at Ask. I also like that they haven’t given up on being a pure search engine and are going to try giving Google a run for their money. Maybe the assumtion is that google is spending so much time on ad platforms, online office products, maps, etc, they are focusing less attention on core search, which leaves it open for the taking by somebody like ask.

    It’s be nice to see players like ask, live search and yahoo gain some traction in pure search to even out the playing a field a bit. ‘Google can do no wrong’ is getting a bit old.

    From a recruiter’s perspective, I am not seeing great people going to ask or leaving them for that matter. I’ll put a call into them to see what’s going. Stay tuned.

    Boris Epstein
    Founder - BINC
    http://www.bincsearch.com

  45. Ashkat

    June 6th, 2007 at 6:23 am

    The UI is great. The results are good but I just don’t see a compelling reason to switch.

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