Ask.com and you shall receive..

Last night I was sat at home, relaxing not on my computer but watching TV with some friends and I happened to see a new Ask.com advert. Now I’m not sure if I’ve seen it before and just not paid attention to it, but last night I actually took it in. The advert was simply to promote the new design and usability at Ask.com. The advert showed an example of a simple search for London and what features you can utilize using ask.com

So I logged in to Ask.com this morning and did exactly as the advert indicated, I typed “London” in the search bar and immediately a Search Suggestions box drops down with relevant queries, top three being London, London underground map and London Map, all pretty relevant but I continued with just selecting London.

Once the three column results page was displayed my first impressions were nothing but admiration for what they had achieved. For so long have we been stuck in the world of 2 column search engines, the big G being the main cause for this as people get “familiar” with such layouts. Before you get scared it’s a very good design and it’s very web 2.0, with large fonts, clear headings, Maps, Current weather, images, Blogs and videos all being displayed on one page!

My goal was to find out some information on the London eye as I have never personally been on it. I used one of the related suggestions displayed on the left side column and was directed to a page full of useful information, photos and Blogs about the London Eye.

One really nice feature was that under the most relevant website (yes the first website really was the best) was a “More Tourist Attractions” drop down menu, which had all the other well known tourist hotspots for the city, again very easy to use.

So I thought to myself that ask have obviously used the best example on their TV advert so obviously the information about London would be of good quality. So I decided to search for “SEO”.

The results were quite different for a non geological search term. For a start only two columns were displayed so there were no images or videos or even Blogs listed on the page, my initial thoughts weren’t positive. However, I was about to discover something quite special, instead of expecting to have all the information in front of me without pressing the mouse more than twice I changed my ways. I clicked the “Blogs” tab on the left column and searched “SEO”.

I was immediately drawn over to the now “third” column which had appeared and listed were the “Top Feeds” which listed Seomoz, Seo Book, Matt Cutts, Seo BlackHat and Seo by the sea. To be honest the top three Blogs listed are in my opinion the three most useful bogs on the web in regards to seo, so top marks for this Ask.com. Something else caught my eye, under the main search results were two buttons, one named “Subscribe” and the other named “Post To”. If you click on the subscribe button a list a various feed readers are displayed which you can subscribe to very quickly, a nice feature if you’re in a hurry. Also the Post to button has incorporated the social media aspect of the web and you can bookmark directly using this button to such sites as Digg and Reddit.

In conclusion Ask.com has really impressed me in terms of usability and content and after using it for only around ten minutes, reverting back to Google, it just doesn’t feel the same. I suggest everyone have a look around the new site and let me know what you think?