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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?
I don't think anyone is really bothered by ads any more. Those that want to see ads (or don't care either way) can see them, and those that don't want to see them don't have to (AdBlock). What's the problem? This is not a big issue in my opinion.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
This is the same as trusting the newspapers, tv sound bytes and what celebrities say. You cannot make serious decisions about anything unless you do in depth research and take all sides into consideration.
I call this "thinking". I do no think it is exclusive to any generation.
Hmm, if they bring back Jeeves, I might contemplate using them ;) Seriously though, I doubt Ask.com will manage to grab much more marketshare. Wikipedia facts are nice and all, but Wikipedia results tend to come up high on Google results anyway. I think that there are simply not enough people who are willing to switch: look at the incredibly large marketshare IE6 continues to have to this day. I doubt they'll be able to withstand Google, Yahoo & MSN in the long run. I have to admit that Bloglines is nice, I use it all the time, and since it exports OPML I can always switch and take my feeds with me.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
a site originally designed to respond to queries in human language that grew into a full-blown search engine after the Teoma acquisition
They make it sound like an "upgrade", but it's the opposite. 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.
For example, how do you search for the difference between the following 2 LaTeX commands:(I know the answer now, but I had to look it up in my reference book, as google was just about worthless for my "latex star" query)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Incorrect. When a contributor to Wikipedia risks losing his principal source of income because what she has written in an article is wrong, then that contributor *begins* to approach equal standing with the professional journalists, writers, researchers, and editors of the "traditional" media and encyclopedias.
Hehe, I guess you haven't read a newspaper in the last 300 years, huh?
The last time I picked up a NYT there were about two clear misstatements of facts or worse for every one essentially correct statement.
There is a reason it's called the first draft of history.
The problem with your thinking is that while professional journalist do have money as a motivator they must also produce "content" or lose that income. Since they only get caught after the newspaper gets thousands of complaint letters, the journalist is only forced to fact check stories on controversial topics. Everything else he writes displays the sorry state of our high schools, which graduate these future workers into journalism schools to produce the army of hacks that edit our nation's press releases for brevity for publication in our newspapers.
The average wikipedian is not only immeasurably better educated than our best journalists, but they are also not under the deadline pressure and threat of job loss that forces the journalist to write total schlock on a regular basis. Of course I grant more credence to a peer reviewed article in a serious journal than to a wikipedia article, but the wikipedia has a hell of a lot more accuracy than any daily newspaper!
Note: I say daily newspaper because I have some faith in the Economist and other weeklies. While the Economist is often laughably off, say when the story is on a continent where they have few reporters or on stories where their idealogical beliefs strongly contradict the facts, most articles seem to have had a serious minded fact checker or an editor give them a quick read.
Ask.com's first result is a webpage on How many fingers can you fit into your ass?. Now that's useful... ;)
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
Why is Ask.com considered a Google "rival" if it primarily serves Google ads?
(How do I know? It serves an ad I've only placed through Google.)
Why is Wikipedia any less trustworthy than any other encyclopedia?
Because the article in Britannica on Maxwell's Theory was written by some dude named James Clerk Maxwell?
*Well, they didn't KNOW the facts were from Wikipedia, but they didn't question them.
We can't blame it all on the web. The quality of our professional academics isn't exactly at its apex either.
KFG
Your post has weasel words that make me doubt your conclusion: "many conservatives" (how many? which ones, specifically?) and "many have turned to ask.com" (same problem). People talk about "many" when they don't have any actual facts or figures, but they want to make a blanket generalization. "Many" is rhetorically equivalent to "one or more," but usually is used when the speaker wants the listener to believe he means "most" (which actually means something: 50% or more). So who cares if "one or more" conservatives stopped using Google? Is there any evidence at all of reduced traffice as a result?
If by "conservative news sources" you mean nonsense like Michelle Malkin, then good riddance to bad rubbish. What that she does isn't news, and she's not a reporter. She posts her opinions, backed by facts that are occassionally right and occassionally wrong - and she never publishes a correction, no matter how wrong she is. She's free to do this, of course, but what she does isn't news.
I am interested in what hate speech you believe exists on dailykos.com, and where you believe it's parallel to the frequent talk of "Leftards" and other hate speech I read on sites like The Jawa Report. You are also making a big assumption about the representativeness of the left-leaning sites you mention with respect to Google news overall, AND a big assumption about the quality of the reporting on these sites compared to the quality of the reporting on the (unnamed) conservative sites you mention. Factual accuracy is something that can be objectively evaluated, but not without specific references. Where do you find factual errors on daily kos, for instance?
Google is in Northern California, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Google is staffed by college graduates, many with advanced degrees, and these people are also more likely to be Democratic than not. Whatever your implication, Google probably couldn't exist if it insisted that 50% of its employees vote Republican. What you haven't demonstrated is that this pattern of private political contributions among Google employees translates to biased search results. Your use of the passive voice ("has been accused") itself suggests that you either don't know who the accusers are, or that the accusers lack any authority and that mentioning their names wouldn't help (or would even hurt) your argument.
Finally, your point about China is true. Google's dealings with China are, alas, no different from Yahoo's or Wal-Mart's, but they are all the same in this respect: they are irrelevant to the topic at hand.
For more information, click here.
>I would like to ask, is there any website UGLIER than ask.com?
http://games.slashdot.org/
But I tried out a couple of genuine searches that frustrated me in both google and wikipedia. Their results were significantly better. :) :) So I am going to eat a bit of crow and use them from time to time.
Competition is a good thing. We wouldn't want google turning into another M$, would we? So what if they are re-using google ads and wiki content? The US media has been serving up used bathwater for decades.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
But, Google is so gamed now that for many searches it's totally useless, while smaller sites like Ask or even AltaVista, which use different (and arguably worse) search algorithms, actually provide more usefull results.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
It's the poorly targeted ads that waste pixels and bandwidth. But ad targeting is getting better over time and "fewer ads" doesn't mean "fewer blinking banners about irrelevant crap" like it did a few years ago.
And if you're searching with intent to buy, ads are even more likely to be signal rather than noise, and search sites with better ads may show you what you want in less time.
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