Ask.com is making its presence felt in the search engine market by introducing two new features of its search engine recently. News.com is reporting that Ask.com is now parsing more data and displaying these in its search results page. Starting today, if you visit Ask.com and ask a question, Ask.com’s algorithms will try to display the answers in the results page instead of just giving out links to the answer. Although, Ask.com used to do this before when it was still Ask Jeeves, the process was manually done before. Whereas now, the whole process is automated through Ask. com’s algorithms.
In addition to parsing data and displaying that in its search results page, Ask.com is also displaying answers from other sites where people have ask questions and the answers given by others.
On the search engine’s cosmetic side, Ask.com is also restructuring the way it presents search results for vertical search. Hence, you’d see results for TV listings and events and various other categories when conducting your search.
Did the search engine improved on its speed as well? According to Ask.com, this 11th version of the search engine is 30 percent faster than the previous version. But speed of course is not the true mark of a good search engine but rather the accuracy of its results. Ask.com says it has improved on that aspect as well.
Quite frankly, I like the way Ask.com’s search results page display its data right now. It still maintains the clean look despite the introduction of new features. And the Q&A portion located on the right side of the search results page can be pretty helpful especially when conducting comprehensive searches on a particular topic.
But the bottomline still is, how accurate Ask.com’s search results are vis-a-vis other search engines’ search results.
