Ask.com: What differentiates it from Google?
During the Web 2.0 Summit, I got a chance
to sit down with the team at Ask.com and find out more
about their search engine. This was straight after a Summit session entitled 'Disruption
Opportunity: Beating Google at Their Own Game' - in which Ask CEO Jim Lanzone and Senior
VP of the Online Services Group at Microsoft (and ex-Ask CEO) Steve Berkowitz discussed
with John Battelle how they are competing with Google. R/WW's coverage of that
session is
here.
Letting the stats do the talking...
Whenever I talk to or meet Ask.com people, I always get the feeling they are a little pissed off at the lack of attention they get from blogs. To compensate, out come the stats to prove how big they are. For example, they often make a point of saying that Ask.com is the 5th biggest search engine in the US - behind Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Also, Jim mentioned during the Summit session that Ask is the 7th biggest web property in the US - ahead of the likes of Amazon, NY Times and Apple.
So there's no doubting that Ask.com is a significant player in the Web business - and I agree they don't get their due for that. But what about the actual product - the Ask.com search engine. How does it stack up? I spoke to the team and took the search engine for a test drive to find out...
What really differentiates Ask from Google?
I asked this of the Ask.com team, in our hallway meeting at the Summit. They told me that Ask's technology "looks at the Web differently". Whereas Google's PageRank ranks its search results by popularity, Ask has something it calls "ExpertRank". Essentially this is an automated search algorithm (like Google has), but on top of that results are ordered using topic communities and the editorial functions that create 'Smart Answers'. While the ExpertRank formula is a secret sauce that Ask.com won't divulge, they do say that the top results in searches are determined by expertise - and not popularity. As it states on their help pages:
"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."
Smart Answers
I was curious to know how 'smart answers' are determined. For a start, they don't pop up on every search result - for example a search for "richard macmanus" displays my primary RSS feed at the top of the page, instead of a smart answer. The Ask team told me that smart answers are editorially done - and is a reminder of their natural language past. If you recall, Ask Jeeves (as it used to be known before the butler was fired, er I mean de-commissioned) started out as a search engine where you could ask a natural language question - e.g. "what the heck is web 2.0?" - and get back a good answer. Smart Answers is an extension of that philosophy of providing a natural language answer to a user's search query. It does this by a combination of automated data mining and human editorial. But the human editors don't physically write the answers, I was told - rather they act as aggregators and filters.
I was told that currently over 20% of Ask's entire search terms - and hundreds of categories - have a Smart Answer.
Comparison of Ask with Google
If you compare Ask.com to Google, there are immediately some noticeable differences. An obvious one is that Ask.com puts its advertisements within the main content pane, instead of in a separate right-hand pane like Google does. So when you do a general search in Ask, the right-hand pane is sometimes occupied by advanced search options. Also Ask often has their 'smart answers' (see above) at the top of the main pane. The effect of all this is to give the user more immediately useful information - and drill down options - on the first page of results. This is what Jim Lanzone meant at Web 2.0 Summit when he said that "Ask.com enables users to do more, faster."
Below are a couple of screenshots, showing a search on "new zealand" in Ask, followed by the same query in Google:
Other Features & Conclusion
Ask.com also says it does social search, but rather than rely on user tagging - which they say is only popular in niche tech circles (e.g. del.icio.us and Flickr) - Ask.com lets its algorithm do the work. It does this by breaking terms down into groups and presenting the results to the user. If you do a search on gardening for example, you'll see how it is broken down into multiple categories.
Ask.com also has the usual search portal (circa 2006) features - mobile, maps, news, blogs, binoculars (page preview), etc. There are subtle differences in all of those features when compared to Google, Yahoo and MSN. But ultimately I have to ask (pardon the pun): is Ask.com 'next generation' enough to challenge the big 3 plus AOL?
I do like the concept of ExpertRank and their willingness to get as much useful info on the first page of search results as possible. It seems like an innovative approach and certainly differentiates Ask from Google.
But when it comes down to it, the results I see aren't sufficiently different to make me want to change. I suspect a lot of Google's 50%+ market share of users feels the same. Ask.com is still a successful business though, even if they don't manage to make great inroads into the market. I'm sure Ask is not crying into its milk about being 5th.
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I sometimes try to use different searche engines. But what makes me stick with Google all the time is the belief that I may be missing precious results that I could find at Google. That's why, even if I'm satisfied with Ask's results, I can't stop querying Google also... This is an interesting psychological effect of Google on me.
I don't know whether users have noticed one thing: in fact, some search engines can give us similiar result with google, but google can show us more accurate excerpt than other engines. this will greatly help people recognize the target information. so only sorting out the websites' name is not enough, accurate and good excerpt from the websites will be very helpful.
Keanu - actually yes, this feature is not a big deal in most cases, because you probably know what you are looking for, but it may help when you search a topic that you are completely new to it.
The feature that Keanu describes is absolutely necessary for me. It speeds up web research immensely to see a text quote. Most information is duplication at this point. I notice that the Ask.com graphic doesn't reference wikipedia, a really good source for traditional encyclopedia style information (tricky with pop culture though). Also google is easier because it is more social since it turned into a verb (even if Google Inc. doesn't like that if it makes them feel better, myspace is also a verb now)
No offense to Ask, but being second place is simply being the first loser in the Search Engine business. Step back to 5th or 7th and you may want to find yourself something different to build with your technology.
No doubt about their employees' passion and perhaps it really is a good product. I'm sure there are a lot of great restaurants out there that go under because nobody gets over there.
Doug, that was kind of a dumbass comment. In 1999 (or so) Google was #2 or #3 and nowhere the juggernaut megacorp they are today. In fact, the world thought everything had been done that could be done with search. Fast forward to today, and search is a much bigger business, and there's a lot more development and innovation built around search, even though it was considered a done deal back then, back when Google was not #1. So what would have happened if Google had settled in for #3 or #2, or maybe back when they were #5, you know behind Excite and the old Netscape?
A LOT LESS would have happened. I'm not a regular user of Ask, but I can't believe anyone would advise them to throw in the towel when year after year we see some of these little guys' technology turn into significant players (or part of other significant players, like Flickr/Yahoo, etc.).
That wasn't an offensive comment. It was foolish.