The New Ask.com: More Skin, More Features, And Simpler Still

Ask.com. There’s a lot of love for the fourth-most-popular search engine on the Net. It’s an industry player that’s okay with not having to fight for the top spot. (Though it certainly would take it if the crown were offered.) It caters to loyalists and is content in knowing it offers more bang for the buck than just about any portal in existence today. Of course, it’d enhance it’s allure even further if I’d take Jeeves out of retirement to start serving results on a red-coated silver platter once again, but hey, we can’t have everything we want. Besides, the penguin suit probably carried with it something of a snob factor, and really, no one likes snobby search engines.

Putting aside the question of where the iconic butler is today, we’re delighted to deliver you news that Ask just had some serious sprucing done to its insides and outsides and has added quite a few new amenities to its repertoire, and hey, what d’ya know, we really, really like it. Okay, I like it. I don’t know how the heck the rest of the team here at Profy feels about it. I presume they’re bullish.

It’s appropriate to start off by stating the obvious: The new Ask.com is gorgeous. Google and Yahoo! aren’t the most attractive engines on the Net, no. But Ask.com? It’s way, way up there.

The revamp to Ask’s aesthetics has been fairly simple, considering its previous arrangement was somewhat similar. Today visitors to the site are greeted with a large white box protruding from a gray base in relief (in the artistic or architectural sense of the term) complete with Java-infused menus and bubbly Web 2.0 icons. Again, it’s simple. It’ll go over well with the site’s regulars, not to mention potential users.

The most utilized segments of the engine are displayed above search bar in text and icon form, and apart from the buttons for ‘City’, ‘Maps & Directions’, and ‘Shopping’, all are individually accessible with one click of the cursor. No new page loads. Just choose ‘Web’, ‘Images’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’ and ‘Video’, enter the desired keyword, and scour the subsequent results. Nothing miraculous, really, but a pleasant feature nonetheless.

The provisions in the menus of the new Ask.com are many. If one creates an Ask.com account, one can access a wealth of information, including recent searches, saved results, personal folders, preferred tags, and so forth. Also, the ‘Options’ menu provides the choice to formulate one’s profile information; the choice to narrow results down to location is also available, as is content filtration.

We mentioned above that visitors to the new Ask.com are met with a white box in which all initial actions are done. Those that think white is a bit passé, however, can opt for something a little more visually sophisticated if they wish. Hit the ‘Skins’ button positioned below the search bar on the main page, and you’ll be shown a drop-down menu of links that, upon rollover, reveal thumbnail preview. Make a decision, and white is replaced with the skin in a second or two.

Don’t worry about losing your choice skin if you venture beyond Ask.com. Upon return your preferred image will greet you once again.

The new Ask.com is clearly superior to its predecessor, and like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently mused, the revamp may indeed give Ask the edge it needs to for it to nab a “point or two against the competition.” A point or two may not seem like much, but if Arrington is correct in asserting that a mere 1% of the search market constitutes $1bn in value, such a slice certainly won’t be a terrible addition to Ask’s share of the industry.