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Jun. 22, 2007 at 1:38pm Eastern by Phil Bradley
Looking At Ask.com's New Home Page Features
The Ask.com blog posts today about Ask's new home page, which they are particularly proud of, and I think rightly so. They talk about their icons, suggest feature and skins, all of which are worth a quick peek.
The nice neat new icons are consistent across the interface and across country versions. There is the "suggest as you type" feature, although there's nothing particularly new about that, since Google has had Google Suggest for some time now.
Interestingly though, Google Suggest kicks in immediately you start typing, while with Ask, it takes two characters. However, from a very brief and unscientific study, the Ask suggestions seem more information and research based, while the Google suggestions appear biased towards commercial content.
"Co" gives us conversion chart, costco, consumer reports, conversions with Ask, while Google gives us costco, comcast, continental airlines and comcast.net, though I'll admit it's a close call. Google does however have the added advantage of indicating how many results there are for each term, which is helpful.
Ask also has eleven skins to choose from, and they've promised users can upload their own in the future.
All well and good, though I'm slightly at a loss as to why the Ask team felt it necessary to devote an entire blog entry for something relatively minor that we all knew about. Well, I suppose it makes a change from reading about their advertising campaign I suppose.
Postscript From Danny: I'm actually a fan of the series of posts Ask has been doing about the changes they brought in as part of Ask3D. For those of us that deal with search all the time, the components they're talking about might seem minor or already known. But I've been viewing those posts as an on-going education effort for a more general audience and thus useful.
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By Phil Bradley
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See Related Stories In: Ask: General, Search Features: General, Search Features: Query Refinement
I love the new design, but I love the way they display the search results even more. It probably won't be long before other search engines follow the same path - of course, by improving it. By the way, I'm very eager to find out how those Australian guys will have their new search engine both as functions and as design.