Search for Stocks on Ask’s experimental search page and you’ll get 13 advertisements and just 9 actual search results on the first page. Same for Mortgages, Cars, and thousands of other terms. For these searches, the first actual search result is 1,000 pixels down the page. Some queries, like Dogs, are a little more reasonable, with just four advertisements on the first page.
All of the major search engines are increasing the number of ads they serve on a page. But at least Google moves most of them over to the right side. Ask puts them above normal search results, so you have to actually scroll down (a lot) just to see the first search result. And Ask pulls other tricks as well, like making the entire horizontal space next to an advertisement clickable on the ad, which makes mistaken clicks happen quite easily as you are trying to scroll down.
If their goal is to destroy search market share, then they’ve got a great strategy.
Update: Note from Ask.com: “This is not a search experience you’d ever find by going directly to Ask.com. As you may know, we’ve actually recently decreased the number of ads on Ask.com and have fewer ads than even Google. It seems that you’ve found an edge case, where a syndication partner may have asked us to increase the number of ads for their traffic to meet their business needs – something other search engines do, as well.”
Bye bye Ask.com. Wait what’s Ask.com again?
this is what happens when you fire Jeeves
Ask is owned by IAC. They are probably, pound for pound, the worst internet company in the world.
That is why I do not use nor recommend Ask.com. That is ridiculous.
Nobody asks for your opinion.
jeeves gotta eat, too.
They haven’t really changed in 10 years.
Absolutely. Is Arrington the only person on the Internet who doesn’t know anybody who works or has ever worked at Jeeves?
Ummm, who uses Ask.com?
http://www.ask....p;o=0&l=dir
Hold on! If the ads are relevant (or the content they are linking to), then in a certain absurd way why not?
That’s classic…. it is an ad engine… it’s the online version of a TV station with all commercials and no shows.
Who says people won’t like this?
Consumers want an answer, that’s why they’re searching. If they’re searching for stocks on a search engine to begin with, they probably want a brokerage account. If they’re typing in mortgage, maybe that’s what they want?
Who says a search engine can’t be successful serving ads alone as the results?
I see this working well for specific niches, however when someone is looking for a fact or wikipedia page by searching their site, they need to have less ads than what is being described.
Yeah, this has been tried before, almost exactly as is. It was called Goto.com (now Yahoo Search Marketing). It started the whole paid search industry. And there was a reason why it went away from its original business model of being a search engine entirely comprised of sponsored links – the poor user experience was unable to draw many loyal repeat customers.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
While you’re correct about GoTo.com being the company that actually invented paid search in the first place (in the late ’90’s), you are seriously mistaken that they supplied a poor user experience with few loyal repeat customers.
In fact; and despite virtually all the supposed “experts” of the time trashing their “ads only” (though they supplemented “few paid results/ advertisers” queries with orgaic search results) approach; it proved to be wildly successful…with both advertisers (who were earning a huge ROI) AND users.
Anyone doubting this need to read John Battelle’s superb book, The Search.
The difference between these (apparently per the Ask response limited) Ask example and GoTo.com’s approach was that GoTo was completely upfront with the users that they WERE looking at ads (in fact, they initially even showed right on the ads themselves how much each advertiser was paying for their ad).
Their groundbreaking, breakthrough system and success was exactly why Yahoo paid 1.6 billion dollars for them.
@Steve
… and Yahoo paid billions more for broadcast.com.
I dont think users are going to think which search engine to use based on the product/service/info they are looking for.
This is nothing more than a desperate one-last-time attempt from Ask.
“One last time” ha ha! Kids these days…
Consumers want an answer, that’s why they’re searching.
Is that right? What praytell is your basis for this assertion? Let me guess: your own imagination.
Funny thing is, you’re actually arguing the irrelevance of Ask and paid search. If the results are just a matter of putting the highest-paying companies into the top results, what’s the difference between going to Ask and just clicking a banner ad on finance.yahoo or wherever?
If they’re searching for stocks on a search engine to begin with, they probably want a brokerage account.
You’re an idiot.
If the results are just a matter of putting the highest-paying companies into the top results, what’s the difference between going to Ask and just clicking a banner ad on finance.yahoo or wherever?
Exactly, there isn’t much. If someone is just going to click on an ad anyway, why not give it to them from the start? Why include some results like a standard search engine would?
You or I might use search engines to research on something to make a decision, but I think there’s a large population that doesn’t. They go to a search engine to find a service or business, and that’s all. For example, typing in “stocks” and clicking on the first link that lets them open a brokerage account. It’s easier to make money off of that crowd who doesn’t want to research or spend time comparing companies than it is to cater to the technologists.
I may very well be wrong, this is just how I see it right now though.
I may very well be wrong
Well, from the number of imaginary unsupported assertions without even a shred of theory, just baldfaced “this is how a lot of people use the internet” statements, you’re not even trying to be right.
ever been to business.com? it’s essentially worse than Ask.com in that they pretty much “only” show ads but make them look like ordinary search results. how much did they get acquired for again?
“They” didn’t get acquired. The reason you know about business.com is that it was a domain name that sold for a lot of money. There was no company before that, and the company that did buy the name and put something on it is, as you’ve noticed, a bunch of spam type people. It’s always been a link farm.
owners of ask know its going to die soon and they want to cash out as much as possible before it dies.
So, if I want to optimize my website or clients’ website for Ask, the best bet is for them to place paid ads to be above the fold? (chuckle chuckle)
No, what you do is call them up and talk to one of their account managers who will help you tailor a selection of keywords for you to purchase. This has been their business model for 10 years.
is there really a ROI in buying search advertising anywhere? nobody clicks on it anyway and even fewer proceed to some action like a registration or purchase.
Seriously? “nobody clicks on it anyway”, where do you think Google gets all their revenue? With a proper game plan search advertising can have a solid ROI and provide a good user experience, depending on the intent of the search.
The Internet has billions of users per day. It only takes a few percentage of them to mistakenly click on an ad for Google to make money off of it.
that explains the click through rates on my google adwords, nobody actually clicks on them and I still get a bill. I wonder how I still get customers from those ads if no one clicks on them. Man you’re a genius, you should start your own business.
They are… genius !
I should come up with these kind of ideas !
When I search the same terms my results have 4 ads on top and 4 ads on the bottom with a shaded background clearly iding them as ads. Not sure where you found that SS but it’s not what I get.
Hi agree with James – I only get four ads when I search for “stocks” and it’s easy to see they’re in a shaded box. Doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me.
Couldn’t be that they’re reading this article, could it?
Strange? When I just search for dogs on Ask.com, I get 10 ads before I reach my first result.
Is Ask heading for the tank?
When I searched for dogs, I got 4 ads before the first result, but then I was signed in.
Good job, Barry Diller. Way to waste shareholder money.
Uhhh, I just went to Ask.com and didn’t get anything like this.
Infact there were only 4 links at the top and a couple down the right side but the real search results were above the fold and didn’t need any scolling.
No lie. Met with one of the European heads early this year. And I actually had to show them how to do a search on the net. I stress, no lie. And this woman was an IAC Director. That was shocking enough so, this aint.
Shudder…Ouch….My brain hurts.
the url that you use for the search is wrong.
the right url is:
http://www.ask....p;o=0&l=dir
it shows fine results.
Why do people always come out with comments like “nobody clicks on it anyway”…….I wish people would stop thinking they are speaking for everyone when they comment on posts on the internet. I feel a sense of irony coming on
I also only saw 4 adds before the results when I tried the same search, and a few more. Maybe it is really random.
Ask was the small team that did some really cool stuff a few years ago to re-energize their site. I remember the maps search sig meeting when this tiny team was pulling of drag and drop re-mapping and other cool stuff.
Then they came out with the nifty background customizations.
I lost track of them, it’s a shame they didn’t keep innovating.
Sounds like they’re much stronger web developers than search engineers.
Well, no one uses Ask.com so I think the world is safe.
Desperate times cal for desperate measures. But not stupid ones. Why not ask the experts: If Barry Diller gave you Ask.com for free, what would you do with it? I’d like to know what the SEO/SEM community has to say. They can’t be getting much from Ask today.
Me? I’d probably revivify our old callinsearch model.
I would re-hire Jeeves and ask him to ask Alfred to ask Bruce Wayne for tips on managing an empire while fighting crime on a part-time basis.
This is much ado about nothing.
Google and Ask are nearly identical with the exception that Ask is cleaner at the top of the page. Both present a total of 11 ads on the page, but Ask pushes 5 of them below the scroll. Result quality for ’stocks’ on both is nearly identical.
If anything, I’d question why Ask, from a revenue perspective, is not sacrificing a bit of usability in order to place ads higher on the page the way Google does (on the right column).
But the author’s arguments against usability are not very strong in my opinion.
I don’t see any big issue in displaying more ads on such a commercial oriented keywords. The organic results for such a big-money keywords are so manipulated by SEOs that it really makes no difference if its a sponsored link or organic – in both cases the company that puts more money into their marketing wins.
Doesn’t look good at all
Ask is a joke. The reason they fail is because they only focus on making money – so naturally their service is gonna suck. If they paid more attention to the users or consumers, they’d be more successful like Google and Yahoo.
Ask doesn’t deserve to be in the game as far as I’m concerned.
This is more interesting: I tried to send ask.com an email but got this error…not once, but twice:
——————————–
We are currently experiencing an unusually large amount of email traffic.
Please try your email again.
——————————-
I guess this says something about where they are technology wise …..
Ask is a joke. The reason they fail is because they only focus on making money – so naturally their service is gonna suck. If they paid more attention to the users or consumers, they’d be more successful like Google and Yahoo.
Since then Yahoo is a success?
I recently experienced the same thing on Rogers Search powered by Yahoo. I put a screen shot of it up on my blog.
Just for fun, I calculated how much of the screen real estate above the fold was taken up by ads. 96% of the results area is ads. See below.
http://www.myde...0011e03e53.aspx
The update makes ask more amusing. Putting in Stocks on the “Main” search engine gives you 9 ads with 9 somewhat relevant result. Searching for ’stocks’ as an image on the experimental makes the result more ridiculous. You do not see any image until you start scrolling.
Okaaay, I get it. Google has patented making the ads non obtrusive
Stop confusing consumers with search users. Consumers are people who bought stuffs. Search users are people searching for information. They can be the same but you mustn’t use it to confuse people. Please use the terms appropriately because a lot of lawsuits arise due to people not understanding a definition to a word or that the word changes its definition.
It is an “experimental search page”, not the regular “ask.com” page (where I only got 4 ads)
for me when i search for stocks, i see only few sponsored results.
i think u got into some bucket or something
I use http://www.tubewoo.com for all my visual search needs and realtime news.
No Ads!!
Ask not what you can get, ask what you can do!
NY rules
That’s why no one uses Ask… :]
I can’t stand the fact that ask.com will not index http://www.puredezigner.com, I have submitted it like 3 times.
As a matter of fact, tt has:
http://www.ask....p;o=0&l=dir
As a matter of fact, it has:
http://www.ask....p;o=0&l=dir
@SES chicago… one thing thats missing from the conferences… not one of the speakers have said anything about making your site better for your audience. I’ve only heard about how to make your site better suited to convert traffic into sales and optimizing ads for sales… oh content is king… so make sure you have content otherwise people won’t convert to sales. Buzz term Searchandizing… buzz word segmentation… Pretty sad. Guess it boils down to “all media does is deliver an audience to an advertiser.” Oh and Ask is on the trade show floor selling “Sponsored Ads”
If you start typing st to try the stock search, the top result it’s guessing you’re typing is “staph infection pictures.” That’s really the most common search beginning with “st?” Ask must have really weird users…
To be honest, I just started using Ask instead of Google because I can’t stand search wiki. However, I hid the Ask ads with a little CSS and a Firefox addon called Stylish.
An ajax search engine that has no ADS http://askalexi...earch/?q=stocks
OXY Search has a universal style web search results page with 13 natural results in main search results body plus 7 sponsored search results. Just 4 sponsored results on top and 3 at bottom.
Plus it has additional related content in the right rail. Here is a search for Cars:
http://www.oxys...Cars&st=web
Ask.com has already failed. The other search engines regularly update their search results. Ask.com continues to have outdated search listings and links to sites that no longer exist–even after ask.com recrawls these sites. There are serious poroblems with the ask.com algorithims. I have sent numerous emails to ask.com when I notice one of these mistakes and I have not gotten a response in over 6 months. I wonder if they have essentially closed up shop and shut have a skeleton staff in place trying to get as much advertising dollars in before they announce bankruptcy.
hmm, i get 4 ads for stocks and cars, and 6 for mortgages.
i don’t believe they would crater their user experience by doing this. michael, maybe you were in an experimental group or you hit a bug?