June 4th, 2007
Ask3D brings a fresh look to search
Ask has breathed some new life into search with a major site overhaul. Dubbed Ask3D, the revamped site combines search suggestions, results and related structured data on a single page. “Search today puts so much onus on users to hunt and peck through millions of blue links,” said Ask CEO Jim Lanzone. “Search doesn’t have to look and act like it did in 1996.”
Lanzone could say the same about search in 2007. Google introduced its new Universal Search last month, which delivers search results across various data sources, including Web sites, videos, images, news, maps, and books, integrated on a single page. It’s similar to Ask3D by virtue of integrating various data types and using sophisticated technology, but it is still mostly a sea of links, lacking the user interface enhancements and layout navigation features that Ask3D delivers.
The left panel on the page includes the Ask’s Zoom Related Search, which suggests related queries to help users express their searches more precisely, with less guess work, Lanzone said. The middle panel houses the search result (which loads first), including Smart Answers and an upgraded Binoculars feature (below), which previews Web pages and includes information, such as the load time at 56k, page weight, number of pop-ups and whether the site is Flash-based.
The third panel applies a new “Morph” content-matching and ranking algorithm to return selected results from a hundred structured databases, such as images (with rollovers), news, music files, videos, encyclopedia entries, business listings, stock quotes and blogs, based on relevance (ExpertRank, which identifies the most authoritative sites) and click popularity (DirectHit) from previous user queries. The Morph algorithm retrieves only the most relevant content and reorders the content modules based on the query, Lanzone said. The Morph content does not appear for all search results, or at least in the demo version I used.
The home page has also been overhauled with new icons, search suggestions as the default and skins. Eventually users will be able to add their skins.
Ask3D is still the Budget to Google’s Hertz and Yahoo’s Avis, to use the car rental analogy, but it has developed a differentiated user experience for users who are looking for a search engine that is easier to drive.
I asked Lanzone about competing against Google’s more spare interface for Universal Search and search philosophy–the ‘cost’ of an extra query is minimal give how fast the engine returns results. “Google went in the right direction, but it’s baby steps. We have more flexibility in what we can do,” Lanzone said. In other words, Ask has less to lose by introducing a totally revamp user experience.
He said that Ask tested Ask3D on 5 percent of the 25 to 30 million users in the U.S. over the last six months. “Their query abandonment went down, and the number of picks into content went up,” Lanzone said. “Other search engines give you lots of links and leave you for dead.”
He admitted that Ask trails competitors in the comprehensiveness of its search engine, surfacing the freshest pages and crawling as deeply on average. “The Edison project, which is next big project this year, is a rebuilding of the entire search engine. We have been working on it for 18 months….We have always done batch crawling of the Web–every few months. Late this year will launch the new search engine, crawling deeper and more incrementally, and with more understanding of the pages,” Lanzone said.
Slowly but surely Ask is making the kind of improvements that will appeal to the broader market of users who are frustrated with the sea of blue links.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
