Ask.com has relaunched its search service with a pack of improvements. Touted as Ask 3D, it integrates results from various media into one page, and does a good job at it. Unfortunately, others are onto it, like Google Universal, Technorati expanding beyond blogs and other third party search engines which are aggregating results.
With everyone making the grade, I wonder if it will change the demographics. But it sure does reflect the change in the search requirements, especially the multiple media and the entry of blogs into the content space. I consider Ask.com the Opera of search engines. I always have it, depend on it for backup or even for verification, but hardly use it. I hope that Ask keeps its focus on search since both Google and Yahoo! are trying to be much more than that, which is scary.
Ask3D has got good reviews from the blogosphere. This thought might be naive but I think that the only for any search engine to beat Google is to gain trust of the users by making everything transparent.

June 5th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
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