It’s the season for top searches, and Ask.com just doesn’t know how to play the game. To compile these, big search engines take all the top search terms for the year and promptly throw the data out. They then compile a list of terms that they think properly reflects key trends that people are looking for, occasionally looking at the actual data for guidance. We saw Yahoo’s list earlier today.
Ask’s comes next. And it’s clear they are being way too honest. The top search is Dictionary followed by MySpace, Google, YouTube and Facebook.
These aren’t searches, they’re navigation queries. Ah well.
Here’s the complete list:
- Dictionary
- MySpace
- YouTube
- Coupons
- Cars
- Craigslist
- Online degrees
- Credit score
See all
Post
I’m wondering who would be searching for Google using Ask.com? Amazing!
it’s the same on all the engines. people just type stuff into the funny box. google and yahoo strip all that out, as well as all the porn stuff, and then rearrange what’s left.
I’m guessing that Ask stripped out the porn stuff as well… They had to have done a little editing!
As far as I’m aware, a lot of it isn’t people explicitly searching. Instead they’re typing the name of the site (e.g. Facebook) into the address line of their browser, and their browser uses whichever search engine is set as the default to resolve to the correct site. The user in this case may not even know he’s using web search.
Analyzing this year’s ecommerce stats for some of our clients’ websites, it appears that ASK organic referrals has the some of the highest sales/ closing rates of any of the Search Engines in the US and UK.
This is taking keywords and unified SERPs positions into account
ask.com need to dress up their list a bit.. this is not just honesty. it borders on stupidity…
Aw, I feel so bad. lol. Ask.com is like that really annoying kid in class. I feel kinda bad.
Despite the blatant lack of reorganizing the data into more interesting “trends”, I still think that the one really interesting result (which does reflect our current economy pretty well and how people think in these time, etc.) is the fact that Coupons is in the top 10. Good to see that people are being more proactive about spending with a more “premeditated” approach. Strange though that “Cars” is up there as well. Are people searching for news about how the industry is failing? They’re definitely not BUYING cars…
- http://www.CouponsCatalog.com
Thanks for spam, kiddo.
I’m not surprised at #6 as http://www.dealio.com, a leading store coupons, comparison shopping and community-generated deals website has seen a big uptick in searches/traffic related to store coupons. It would have been more interesting for Ask.com to show the top coupon store searches or top cars.
Leading? Yeah, sure. Pathetic spammer.
Trying hard not to come off as a broken record, but about 60% of all searches are actually navigation queries. it’s why I did RealNames back in the day. users just need to be sent to the place they type in for those queries. We have dns for those who know how to use URLs and we need Keyword navigation for those who use search engines to navigate.
Google’s “I feel lucky” already does this, as does Chrome. it’s inevitable.
OK, rant over
Best
Keith
Ask must have some search deals going on so when web newbies log on to the intertube thingy they just type in whatever in the search field. It took me months to get my mom to not type into the search box.
How surprising. A harsh review of an Ask/IAC site. Wow. I could’ve never expected such a post from a TechCrunch writer. Shock. Awe. Sarcasm.
Ask.com should not Ask it self for the right answer. It should ask google
This post is one sided and does not show the complete Ask top searches of 2008. Here is a link to view them all: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/2008/topqueries.shtml
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stop spamming elva
People search for online degrees?!? … does this mean they enjoy getting the spam as well?
lol using ask to search google must be noobs
Ya, everyone knows they are one of the big 4, but they never return anything good for your searches.
I like Ask for a number of my searches. I have used it even when it was known as askjeeves. I have to admit that I did not always get the best results. Which puzzles me a little bit since I have been told that it searches the search engines.