About Ask.com
By Drew A. Calderone
Ask.com is a search engine that has fallen into relative obscurity over the last few years. This is ironic, as Ask has been something of a groundbreaker in the line of search engines.
Founded in 1996 by Garret Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California, AskJeeves, as it was then known, was the first search engine to have a natural language-based search program. Natural language has the benefit of allowing users to type in questions in simple, common, day-to-day speech, rather than typing in a keyword and having to follow the sometimes-complex rules of keyword-based searches. The Jeeves character was retired in February of 2006.
Aside from its basic feature as a search engine, Ask has a toolbar with various other options. Among these are an image search program, where the user types in a word and appropriate images are brought up, a news option with subcategories such as front page news, top stories, sports, business, and so forth. Ask has a map and directions device, the address, zipcode, or city is typed in for maps, and the origin and destination cities, addresses, or zipcodes are entered for directions; there is also a local directions search engine available. Location is also needed for Ask’s weather search. There are also encyclopedias, dictionaries, and a Blog and Feed search feature. Finally, there is Ask for Kids, a research tool designed for schoolwork up to an eighty grade level.
The Ask site is an easily used facility, the directions are pretty much self evident. However, for those users who are less than computer-savvy, there is also an Ask.com interactive demonstration. The demo is a video that explains the use of Ask’s Search Tools, Related Searches, Smart Answers, which are actual answers to questions, thanks to Ask’s natural language compatibility; and finally, the demo delves into Expert Rank, which explains how Ask finds the authenticity and authoritativeness of its search results. The drawback to the demo is its slow load-time, which is especially frustrating to those who actually need its instruction.
The major problem with Ask is that, because of the fact that it is a natural-language-based search engine, and that it checks the authenticity and authoritativeness of each item that is found by its web-spiders, it can take a long time for a site to appear among its search results. The only plus side to this limitation is that the user does not have to dig through mounds of results, like what is often found in other search engines like Google, where the user could be looking at the first twenty search results out of a total 2,614,000,000 possible results; results which may only have the flimsiest relation to the user’s intended goal.
Points to Remember
General Background of Ask.com:
Features of Ask.com:
Pros & Cons of Ask.com: