Ask.com Redesign Seeks to Give the Right Answers, Not Just Links
On Friday, Oct. 3, IAC/InterActiveCorp launched a redesign of their Ask.com search site, with an emphasis on turning up useful answers on the result page, rather than just links.
“Our goal is to deliver the best answer to you, the first time, every time,” Erik Collier , VP of Product Management stated on The Ask.com Blog.
Ask.com is trying to differentiate itself from Google and seeks to become the choice search engine for those asking questions, rather than searching for keywords. While asking questions accounts for about 5% of searches to Google, Yahoo, and Microsft Live Search, questions account for 15% for Ask’s queries.
“The new look puts more information on the first page of search results,” Ask Chief Executive Officer Jim Safka said in an interview. It also addresses a crucial shortcoming of the fourth-largest U.S. Web search engine: less-relevant results than leader Google, especially for obscure terms.
Ask.com president Scott Garell told PC Magazine on Friday that the site update would not only enhance the relevance of its results, but also offer a trimmed-down user interface and a 30 percent speed improvement.
This release “represents a culmination of a lot of heads-down engineering and looking at what our users were doing on the site,” said Garell. “Right now, a user doesn’t get to the best answer until 3 to 4 clicks after the search box. We want to present the best answer the first time, every time.”
“Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience,” said Collier while introducing three new answer technologies on The Ask.com Blog: DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm. “These technologies take both structured and unstructured data, and - instead of delivering a title and description for each document - they deliver answers.”
To learn more about Ask’s new technologies, visit The Ask.com Blog.
