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Ask.com's Rising Star
hdtv writes "Fortune magazine takes a look at Ask.com, a site originally designed to respond to queries in human language that grew into a full-blown search engine after the Teoma acquisition. According to Fortune, Ask.com has many features not available with rivals -- topic clusters, quick facts from Wikipedia on the search page, and, (what counts most) fewer ads than any of the rivals. Currently Ask.com maintains 5.9% share, a share that Fortune is sure will grow."
Clusters and Wikipedia ... Surely you mean clusty.com right?
Text ads are difficult to Adblock - you can Greasemonkey them, but it's hassle. On top of that, the ones on ask.com seem to be very annoying - a long list that takes half the page, so they are very difficult to ignore. I prefer Google's less prominent ones.
This is obviously untrue-- there are zero ads on Wikipedia, which seems to be where ask.com has lifted much of the content only to wrap it in paid-for-placement ad banners. Do a search on ask.com and you'll get the top-3 sponsored paid ad links first, then the top-ten actual search results, and then another 5 sponsored paid ad links. By my count, about forty percent of the links ask.com shows you when you search are ad links.
Next, we could consider the author, who isn't identified by name or email address, but by a link to a freshly registered domain that's just over two weeks old:
View the "page info" and take a look at the links, this seems to be nothing more than an article by a shill who is getting paid to promote products and/or do market research on people who read Slashdot.
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
"just about worthless" ??
... Note that when you put the asterisk '*' in front of % the text, that the section, ...
The search terms 'latex asterisk circle' gave this as 2nd result:
A Guide to LaTeX
\circle{d} draw circle of diameter d; * form draws solid disk \oval{x
www.astro.rug.nl/~kuijken/latex.html - 36k - Cached - Similar pages
- One needn't even follow the link. Google is your friend.
For more information, click here.
I bet I could use ask.com if it could really answer questions and they concentrated on that, instead of being a generic search engine.
Sometimes I use START http://start.csail.mit.edu/ when I have a question like "what's the biggest country in Europe" or "What's the distance between Buenos Aires and Rosario"
You used to be able to go to teoma.com and get a very clean page. now it redirects you to this fancy looking page. I still like Ask Desktop Search. It's a bit nicer in some ways than Google Desktop.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire