Underdog Ask offers an editorial search experience

With Google’s stock price topping $500 today it seems natural to give some props to a valiant underdog. About a month ago I stopped using Google exclusively for general internet searches, because I realized that in many ways Ask provided a better search experience. Let’s first acknowledge Ask’s weakness. The core results on Ask are similar to Google, but they are not updated as quickly. Google’s computing power can simply gobble up the web faster than any other search engine. The ranking and presentation of the core results are also slightly more honed by Google’s tried and tested search algorithm. For pure search results Google is still the best choice, however, do to Google bombing, link spamming, and a thousand other tricks the natural search results are often inadequate.

This is where Ask’s editorial approach to search has a real advantage. The Ask team has made the decision to highlight results from websites that they deem trustworthy, and place these results at the top of the page above everything else including the advertisements. For example, when a user types in a country name Ask returns the CIA Factbook entry for that country followed by a slew of other highly relevant links including: Encyclopedia Entry, BBC Profile, History, Anthem, Flag, Maps, US Government Travel Info, Tourist Attractions, Current Weather, Local Time, etc.. Like Google Ask also returns the latest news on the country, but I could take this or leave it, since I usually go to a dedicated news site for the latest news.

The second major feature that I have found infinitely helpful is Ask’s suggestions for other searches related to the current query. The most common suggestions are a list of terms that narrow your search, expand your search, or are related to your search terms. Often the suggestions lead to better queries that I initially did not think of. Google could offer this feature, but it would require that Google remove ads from the right hand column of it’s search results. This would cost The Goog a huge amount of ad revenue, which it is not willing to part with. Apparently, the Ask team is willing to give up the ad revenue for this additional feature that differentiates it from other search engines.

These features make Ask a more user friendly search engine that I would recommend to anyone regardless of their experience with search. However, I think that Ask’s editorial search experience is going to be a big hit with new searchers once they discover it. Ask is clearly targeting users who want to find information fast without having to enter an elaborate boolean search query. Best of luck to our underdog of the day!