Tag: ask
Ask.com brings back Jeeves
After a few years of being Jeeve-less, search engine Ask.com has brought back its iconic butler following, the company claims, “public demand”. The company told Tech Digest that research has shown that users “missed his friendly, human, touch”.
Jeeves will be returning in 3D, given a makeover by Framestore – a company that worked on The Golden Compass and Chronicles of Narnia. He’s also got some new threads, courtesy of Savile Row tailors Gieves and Hawkes. They do rather make him look more like a banker or a politician, though.
Jeeves was originally inspired by the butler to PG Wodehouse’s “Wooster” character, which has come to represent the stereotypical English butler. He left Ask.com in 2006, but Ask.com’s traffic hasn’t exactly skyrocketed since, which is presumably the reason behind his resurrection.
Ask.com gets niche as the search engine relaunches
Search engine to the elderly Ask.com has announced the relaunch of its site refocusing on the premiss upon which it started – answering questions.
After surveying users, Ask discovered that what people wanted was faster, more accurate searching with correct results first time. Should we be surprised?
The revamped pages take the to web today…
Review: Ask3D – Ask's revamped search engine
I’m choosing to forget Ask’s rather bizarre ‘propaganda’ advertising of their new search “Ask 3D” search engine as I take a look at how effective it is as a tool, and whether it’s going to pose a threat to Google.
There’s more to Ask3D than the slightly shiny, icon-based eye candy that greets you when you arrive at their front page.
Both Google and Ask are keen to offer a more holistic approach to search results. A search for “Steve Jobs” in Google brings up the usual listing of results, but interspersed with news and video. It’s easy to find these items by scrolling through the results, but they’re not particularly distinct at first glance.
Ask, on the other hand, clearly separates regular web pages, listed in the middle column, from multimedia content and the latest news, displayed in sections in the right-hand column. It’s an elegant layout, marred only slightly by the “Sponsored Results” boxes which don’t integrate as well as their Google counterparts, and can sometimes take up to half of the screen before search results are displayed.
