Have You 'Ask'ed?

There was a time in like 2000 I guess, when I used to chat with some personnel online on a topic of search. And the website answers questions. The company called itself 'Ask Jeeves'. It was a different business model altogether then. It wasn't a one-two words search. I used to chat about a certain question with some person online at the site and later the contents of the whole chat session will be sent to me.

And now, things have changed. It's no more questions & answers but words Googling - Just like Kodak Moments! But, lately I have been seeing too many Ads on TV giving some of the features of Ask.com and right away comparing & hitting on Google's way of searching - Some word like Grisly Bear or something of that sort, A kid explaining how Google is bad!

Well, for me the questions that stood right out is - When did it become Ask from Ask Jeeves? How come it is able to pour in so much of money in this new marketing campaign - I mean, something which is standing at the end of the competition when compared to Yahoo, MSN, Google, A9...? So, obviously I went on to Ask something. It was in February 06 when the new name came into existance. The site has been bought by InterActive and so, they are behind all the marketing funds. Ok! But, is it really different? Another Ask!

Not bad at all. A site built on the concept of value-adding to search. So, I gave Sun Microsystems as a search text.

• The company's stock price immediately below which we know is falling after their layoff plans.
  
• Then an explanation from Wikipedia, with the company's logo in the side.
  
• Some news headlines right away - Not Like Google, which takes us to a new page.
  
• Then comes 3 Ads. Well, mostly Google puts all its Ads abobe & on top of all its answers.
• Then the regular set of search results.
• The binoculors which shows a snapshot of the page to be visited - with so small texts. Why is this? What value does it really adds? Is there a reason we need to know how the website looks before we go there? We are looking for answers to our queries not the look & feel of the websites!
  
• Some more ads at the end - This ain't good making user to scroll more!
• But some good & different things of notice is at the right side - Gives easy links to pull ourselves inside our query like 'Narrow Your Search' - Stock, UK etc or push outside with 'Expand Your Search' - Sun Java, UNIX, IBM et al!
• Has one more set of links called 'Related Names'! - Has Scott but not Jonathan!!??:)

The links in the right side are quite cool. Some more to Ask! Ended up in a technology called Teoma which is renamed as ExpertRank by Ask. Here is the explanation -

With Ask search technology, it's not just about who's biggest: it's about who's best. Our ExpertRank algorithm goes beyond mere link popularity (which ranks pages based on the sheer volume of links pointing to a particular page) to determine popularity among pages considered to be experts on the topic of your search. This is known as subject-specific popularity. Identifying topics (also known as "clusters"), the experts on those topics, and the popularity of millions of pages amongst those experts -- at the exact moment your search query is conducted -- requires many additional calculations that other search engines do not perform.

No wonder! It is working on topic clusters and so, it is able to pull up the norrow, expand and related names links.

Well, on a funny note, I Asked for Tamil too after the Google Video stats - You see TamilEelam symbol, LTTE explanation from Wiki, Sun TV in a dropdown and in the side - SriLanka Map, Vijay, Mumtaj, Shakeela & Simran. What the heck!!??:)