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Ask Jeeves Looks to Outshine Google
bizpile writes "The AP is reporting that Ask Jeeves is looking to distinguish itself from its competitors by adding new tools for visitors to save and organize links to Web pages they find through the company's online search engine. "Google is not better than us," said Jim Lanzone, an Ask Jeeves senior vice president. "We are both operating at a world-class level. We just have a different flavor." This free feature is scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday." With Amazon's new search engine recently arising, it definitely appears to be a critical time for search engines.
I use different search engines all the time, more for a laugh than anything. Frankly, they all find what I'm looking for. I like the fact that they don't all suffer from Google's inability to cope with wildcards.
Detect*
is more convenient than
detect OR detecting OR detects OR detector
for example.
Before:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030324210627/http://
After:
http://ask.com/
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
It all comes down to whether you appreciate a clean, uncluttered interface, or if you want anything but simplicity. Google has pulled it off the best. Ask Jeeves is currently basically a lame ripoff of the Google interface, and A9 is fairly clean but there is still too much going on for my tastes. Any other major search engine has way, way too much going on. And regardless of how amazingly fast A9 works, I am certain that plain old Google will continue to be the cleanest, fastest, and most efficient search engine. My only gripe is that searching on Google is still far from intelligent.
I am feeling fat and sassy
Lets face it, people don't want to organize links. The only thing they want is to find what they are looking for. The one that does that the best is the best engine. The one that finds exactly what you're looking for every time. THIS is the next generation search engine.
Used to be that when you asked "funny" questions, you got "funny" answers. In fact, you can read the old result to this question here. So - they may have confused more potent technology with "growing up" in a way that Google, thankfully, has yet to do.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Not Flamebait. This was an old easter egg in Ask Jeeves. Doesn't work anymore though. He also used to answer "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" with "What do you mean? A European or an African swallow?"
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
That's all there is to it. Based on this blurb, I went to look at Ask Jeeves, and see what they had to offer. Ran a search, clicked on a result - and they lost me when they kept control of a portion of my browser window so I could run another search.
I don't understand why so many companies don't understand such a simple concept: get off my back. Isn't Google's example clear enough for them? I like Google because it's fast and accurate, by and large. Because it's a simple page that loads quickly even if I'm somewhere on a dialup. It doesn't pop windows over or under my browser window. In short, Google acts like they want to help me, rather than like they want me to help them.
That's all there is to it. I can't think of a feature a search engine could add that would overcome Google's interface advantage. To get my clicks, another search engine would have to have an even more simple interface, and I see that being hard to accomplish.
Wait, I lied. If a search engine was able to somehow figure out what I mean conceptually rather than contextually, I would use it all the time...but since that would require an almost human level of language comprehension, I don't think I'll need to worry about switching any time soon. As it stands, AJ's "natural language" abilities were just "we won't tell you we ignored 'of' and 'the' in your search request."
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Well, at least the AskJeeves site didn't return an advertisement for "Big Huge Penis pictures".
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Aw.
It's been awhile since I used AJ, but back in the day, you could ask, "Are you gay?" And Jeeves would respond, "I prefer the term 'jovial.'"
Not anymore, alas.
> What, you mean like ~detect~
Sort of, except ~protect~ gets me words which Google's algorithm decides are similar, such as "password", "defend" etc, and not "unprotected", although perhaps that's because it just looks like ~word~ means *word* but perhaps actually means word*. Hard to tell when it's not documented anywhere.
> literally hundreds of advanced functions that almost no other search engines
> posses..
*Literally* hundreds? Where are they? Is the ~word~ thing documented anywhere? I did look! Is this stuff in beta?
Also, they didn't mention one very important thing. Google's Cache. Extremely important in many of my searches where ANY reference to something is needed, even an old link...text only.
CACHE!!
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Pepsi operates "at a world class level", but they "just have a different flavor" than Coca-Cola.
Burger King operates "at a world class level", but they "just have a different flavor" than McDonalds.
Yeah, but people have heard of Pepsi and Burger King, and they use their products/services.
We don't like monopolies in our marketplace
Sometimes we do. I'm happy with google being a monopoly for my searches. I've always used one search engine. Before google it was altavista. If altavista or jeeves made a better search engine for me, I would use it exclusively. My main beef with google is that its hard to make a search to differentiate between information about a product and those pesky people that all want to sell me a product. It would be really cool if google would basically have 2 discrete searches. One for buying stuff (froogle) and one just for searches. Its gotten very annoying how companies have googlebombed their name and their products by purchasing a bunch of domains that all point to each other. I personally wish there were more integrity at the DNS level, but thats another topic.
One little trick I use which is often helpfull for eliminating the online retailers that have google bombed is to use -shipping at the end of my search. This will generally eliminate sites wishing to sell me the product and leave legit sites with info about the product alone.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Documentation on ~ was only 2 clicks away from the homepage (the "more >>" link, then "web search features" at the side of the next page).
As for the features of google, there's no way I'll be able to list them all here, but they can all be found by looking through the links in help pages and whatnot...
Well, here's my attempt anyway: search within the url, search within the title, search within the page, search for similar terms, search for exact terms, search within ragnes of numbers, search within dates, search within certain sites or tlds, search for certain filetypes, search for images, webpages, products. Theres specially made pages which search for U.S government stuff, mac stuff, bsd stuff, microsoft stuff and linux stuff, search for things in universities, theres google news, the calculator, spell checker, language translator, file translator, google answers, alerts, groups, gmail, blogger, toolbar, apis, theres that local search thing, maps, google directory, photo organiser, upcoming google browser, etc. etc. etc.
I disagree that Google will have to seriously misbehave to lose market share. I think Google could go chugging right along its merry way, with "no evil" and a small army of brilliant engineers and all that, and still wake up one day and find itself at pr near the bottom of the slagheap. Problem A is that people have no brand loyalty on the web, whatsoever. The cost of my switching from Google to AskJeeves, or Amazon to BN, is nil. How many of us went from using AltaVista to Google and never once looked back? Problem B is that their whole business is built around one or two neat little conceits: namely, PageRank and a highly streamlined UI. The latter is easy to rip off (already has been) and the former leads to... Problem C: it's difficult at the top. Everyone optimizes for PageRank, meaning the quality of Google's results is constantly degraded by commercial websites trying to game the system. The moment someone comes up with something as smart and new as PageRank was in 1996, all bets are off. This, BTW, is I think why Google mounts such a ferocious and self-consciously elite recruiting effort. The realize what a fragile equilibrium their dominance is based on, and they want to hire that someone before (s)he realizes they're sitting on a goldmine.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
In theory, if Jeeves actually did a good job of understanding natural language--as good as decade-old AI--it would be very useful for certain kinds of searches that are difficult on Google (without using a certain amount of lateral thinking).
For example, there is a series of detective novels by in which the author Jack London, best known as the author of "The Call of the Wild," is a character (the detective, in fact).
If you can't remember the author or title and want to find these books, it is very difficult to do so with Google. Most searches return mishmashes of results about the author Jack London and detective novels by other authors.
If the premise of AskJeeves were correct, it would be perfect for this search.
But, in fact, if you type in "What are some detective novels in which Jack London appears as a character?" you get exactly the same kind of mishmash as Google gives you. AskJeeves isn't, for example, smart enough to go in turn to amazon.com and search in "books" for "Jack London detective" (which returns "The Golden Gate Murders" by Peter King as the second hit).
AskJeeves doesn't seem to do much more than throw away irrelevant words.
If the "natural language" feature of AskJeeves worked, it would be part of my search toolkit. In fact, every time I've used AskJeeves, the results I get are inferior to those I get with Google or Yahoo.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Cache is important to geeks. Geeks have never followed traditional market share rules.
... all very common letters) versus "askjeeves" (1 a, 2 s's, 1 k, 1 j, 3 e's, 1 v ... k and v being far less common)
What makes Google more popular with the masses (beyond the obvious things like having one of if not the best databases) is ease of use.
Sad, but it's true, it is simply easier to remember to type "google.com" than "askjeeves.com".
Why?
"Google" is a simpler word (2 g's, 2 o's, 1 l, 1 e
Additionally when you think of "google" it is a single word that, because it has no other meaning for most folks except as that funny word they learned in 7th grade math (though possibly misspelled) has been able to become synonymous with "search" because it doesn't conflict with any other associations.
"Askjeeves" is actually 2 words that form a rudimentary sentence that you then have to remember to condense back into one word, none of which is synonymous with "search" (to many, "searching" and "asking" are 2 separate actions).
Corollary to the above, you can turn "google" into a verb, thereby attaining the idea of "googling someone". The brain doesn't compute "I askjeevesed someone" and the closest "I asked someone" isn't comparative because it is not specific enough.
Google may have stumbled on it (or been far more market savvy than people thought in the "old days"), but plain and simple they have a TERRIFIC brand to work with from a marketing sense. Most of the arguments above can be made for almost every other search facility out there except Yahoo! (who still lose out on the simplicity of letters but have a longer brand record).
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.