Even though it appears that Google won the search engine wars years ago, alternatives to The Big G’s dominance online continue to exist. Yahoo search, for example, continues to attract a respectable (if not overwhelming) percentage of the market. But in the contest to design a more perfect search engine, it could be a California-based Ask.com that is the dark horse to win the race.
Ask has been around for ages — formally known as AskJeeves.com — but they’ve never been able to grab a significant share of online search, even when compared to the number two search engine, Yahoo.com. But lately, Ask has been toiling away in an attempt to improve both the speed and relevance of the results from its search engine. The company rolled out the newest version of Ask.com on Monday, which they believe is the most advanced search engine available online — even better than Google.
The new Ask has made significant improvements behind the scenes. Engineers have optimized and rewritten endless lines of code in order to create a more light weight interface, which provides speedier results. Ask claims the new interface is 30 times faster than previous versions. The company has also increased the number of web sites indexed, giving users a broader variety of relevant answers to their queries.
The user interface has largely been left unchanged; you won’t find any sexy 3-D graphics or impressive scripts. But when it comes to search engines, it’s what’s under the hood that counts; and it is here that Ask has made significant changes.
There are, however, a few cosmetic changes. For example, the Ask.com results page now features two panels (they previously displayed three), and they have added a Q&A section to offer users frequently asked questions and answers regarding popular search terms. None of this is particularly groundbreaking of course, but it does add a certain element of user-friendliness to the page.
Company representatives claim that extensive testing of the new Ask.com search engine has yielded very favorable results, and produced an increase in recurring visitors, returning to the site time and again for their online searches. But even with the improvements to their search engine, Ask will likely continue to labor quietly in the shadow of Google — at least for the foreseeable future.
However, with Google firmly positioned as the number one search engine worldwide (capturing over 50% of the market share), many experts feel they have nowhere to go but down. This provides a great opportunity for small and scrappy companies like Ask.com to siphon off visitors and create some real competition in the online search arena.
Related Website Directory Categories:
