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Ask… and you shall receive
By Laurie | September 24, 2007
I vividly remember 1996. It was the year I graduated high school. *gulp* It was also my first year of college, and ultimately my first year of really being an Internet user. I had dabbled here and there at school and at friend’s houses, but we were a no Internet household. It’s sad, but true.
| It’s crazy how fast the Internet replaced libraries in terms of doing research for projects and papers. I was always in the lab. Who was I asking for help? Nope not the lab tech, but rather Jeeves. There was no such thing as Google at the time (it was still in the production stages), so in my opinion, the pioneer of online search engines was Ask.com, formally called AskJeeves.com. And Ask him I did. Back in the day, you wouldn’t do keyword searches. Instead you would “Ask Jeeves” (the virtual butler) what you wanted to know in the form of a question, and he would hunt down the information for you. He would even give you an alternate list of questions you may want to ask next. I used it daily. |  |
Unfortunately for Ask, companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and other competetors entered the picture. They began to lose users, and eventually lost me too. I became a full-fledged Yahoo! girl, and still am to this day. I never gave in to the pressures of Google, even now.
Ask dropped Jeeves last year, and have recently come out with a brand new redesign of the site. Ask displays results in the center of the page, and also has a sidebar frame that gives other options to narrow your search. This reminded me a lot of the old extra questions Jeeves would offer. Not only that, but Ask also displays results from videos and blogs too. That’s a nice touch and is different from the other sites, but usually I am just looking for basic search results and this takes up a lot of the screen. I know how to find the other stuff if I need to. There are also a lot of “sponsored results” on both sides of the search results which is just plain annoying to have to scroll through (four on the top and bottom with the results sandwiched in between– YIKES!). At least with Yahoo! they are are in the sidebar and I don’t even have to look at them, and if they are at the top and bottom there are usually only two that do not even get in the way.
I do like the “Blog” search feature on Ask. I found Laurigami quite easily, but the results for this site (La Vie de Laurie) were not very good. A few entries were indexed, but not all of them. It is quite a bit newer though. After that, I did a search to find out how to get your site indexed with Ask, but I guess users are unable to submit their sites, and instead have to be found by their crawlers. It would be nice if there was a page for that like the other major sites have.
Overall Ask will get you the answers you are looking for, but it definitely takes longer and involves more “work” to get them. Variety is the spice of life though, and I do like that I can get completely different results when looking on Google, Yahoo! or Ask. I’m not ready to add their toolbar just yet, but with a few more improvements they just may be able to win me back.
Maybe if I Ask nicely?
Recap:
Topics: Tid-Bits | 7 Comments »
Good post! I like the way you tied AskJeeves into your life. I miss him, too.
Posted by: CyberCeltYou’re totally going to win that printer.
Posted by: corrinjeeves irked me. thats one reason i never liked ask. another was that their results never seemed to be what i was looking for. good post.
Posted by: suni[...] Apostolos Gerasoulis and Ask.com 12. Ask?and you shall receive 13. Where has Jeeves [...]
Posted by: Blog Battle Royale at my thoughts on September 25th, 2007 at 5:49 pm@ CyberCelt– Thanks! Ask just isn’t the same without him!
@ Corrin– You’re optimistic! I like that. I’m not campaigning for this one, so I don’t think I will win. That’s okay though. I just enjoyed writing the post because I was an original user of Ask and it was nice to go back to see how it has evolved.
@ Suni– I agree– Ask’s results were always interesting and it definitely took a lot longer to find relevant information. Looks like that hasn’t changed… at least in my opinion. Thanks for the complement on my post!
Posted by: LaurieI always get a kick out of looking at my incoming traffic and seeing that someone asked Google a long full sentence question I always think of old Jeeves.
Posted by: martin[...] Ask?and you shall receive 13. Where has Jeeves [...]
Posted by: TotalDismay.com » Blog Archive » Competitive Blogging on September 26th, 2007 at 8:15 am