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The Algorithm Is A Disappointment
from the may-we-ask-why? dept
There's a lot of discussion today about the newly revamped Ask.com, which remains in the unenviable #4 spot in terms of search market share. Basically, the site seems to have sharpened up its interface a little bit, while incorporating things like news and images into its results page. Additionally, the site offers suggested refinement searches, so if you search for "Sopranos", it'll show you a link where you can get results for "Sopranos Merchandise". All of this is fairly inoffensive, but it's really hard to see how this is going to move the dial at all. Despite the company's insistence that it has developed "A Truly New Way to Search", the whole thing looks like a spin on Google's recently announced universal search strategy, which involves incorporating more types of media into its results. The look and feel is a tad different, but so what? Even if the new Ask.com returns "better" results than Google in some instances, there's nothing here that will actually get people to switch. Right now, the company is making a big effort to explain why the new changes are cool, but most people giving the site a try won't have the benefit of someone explaining to them why the site is now so great. As such, they probably won't see it themselves.
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Yawn
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Organize your thoughts.
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Re:
Use commas, please.
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Not just a search engine
Before I switch I will need e-mail as advanced or more than gmail, and a personalized homepage like iGoogle.
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Re: Not just a search engine
If Ask.com really was better, and people were convinced of that, people would switch regardless of the features.
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Re: Re: Not just a search engine
Google was clean, simple, and had very unobtrusive advertising.
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um, duh
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Google is still best
I'm really surprised they haven't stepped in to make that better than everyone else, but they do have a lot of projects to handle while also providing the best web search tool around.
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Google is a verb.
Find out more here.
Also, you can try out Google's new timeline and map features by following your search with 'view:timeline' or 'view:map'. (again, without quotes) (volcanoes view:map or einstein view:timeline)
It's all pretty swell, if you ask me.
PS- Ask dot com commercials suck. It seems like they're trying to be funny, and failing in such a way that the failure isn't even funny.
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I think it is the integration
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Its all about the quality of the search results
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Too many Ads
As many inappropriate sponsored links as organic results is too mach.
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Fewer ads than others
On Ask I get 3 ads on top + 6 on bottom = 9 total.
Google: 3 on top + 8 ads on right side = 11 total
Yahoo: 4 on top + 8 ads on right side = 12 total
And Ask has stuff on the right that might actually be usefull, rather than ads like all the others.
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I think that what will finally topple google will be an 'application' rather than another SE website. But that might be years down the road, or never...
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