Radically New Ask.com

The most interesting search company that isn't Google. Ask.com has been trying to fill that niche for awhile now--OK, I'm sure they'd say they aim to be the most interesting search company, period--and in many ways they've been succeeding. And never more so than with Ask's all-new user interface, which just launched.

Dubbed Ask3D and based on an experimental interface called Ask X that's been in testing for awhile now, the new look doesn't look much like Google, or the old Ask, or, actually, any other search engine I've ever seen. More than maybe any engine I've seen, it feels like a Web application--and one that takes advantage of the technologies that make Web applications circa 2007 both powerful and fun to use.

Like Google's new Universal Search, Ask is melding Web results, news, images, video, and more into one set of results. But instead of weaving everything together in ways whose rationale isn't particularly clear, Ask now uses a three-pane interface that gives you a search pane on the left, then Web results, then other stuff. Here are the results for a search for the Attorney General (click on the image to see a larger version):

(Incidentally, since the right-hand well is devoted to search results, the ads are on top of the center-well Web results. That pushes 'em down a bit--but it seems like a fair tradeoff.)

As with Google's approach, I don't always understand why Ask decides to display (nor not display) certain types of results for particular queries. When I search for "Paris Hilton" I get news results; when I search for "Paris France" (or any of several other geographical queries), I don't. I get videos of presidential candidate Bill Richardson, but no video results when I search for a phrase that popped into my mind as requiring video results: "mentos diet coke." A search for "New York" puts a map in the right well; one for "San Francisco" puts it in the center.

In other words, I think that both Ask's and Google's versions of universal search would benefit from more consistency and coherency. But I do like Ask's layout, as well as the wide range of types of info it returns--such as news photos. On the other hand, Google Universal Search lets you watch videos right in the results page--one of the advantages of owning YouTube--while Ask3D, at best, appears to give you herky-jerky little thumbnails that crudely show you the video you're about to click through to.

There's a lot of other interesting stuff about the new Ask, some of which the old Ask had in one form or another, and some of which it didnt. The left-hand well of the new results page attempts to help you with your queries in various ways--for instance, as you type, it suggests search phrases:

...and once you've searched, it provides other at least vaguely-related searches you can try (I'm a Red Sox fan, but I deny responsibility for the first one under "Expand Your Search"):

Little pushpins next to search results let you save Web pages to a personal library:

Oh, and the whole thing has a slick, animated, Ajaxy, colorful look that would seem to be an intentional effort to be the antithesis of proudly dowdy Google. You can even skin the initial search page, although I'm not sure why you'd want to:

Of course, the bottom line with any search engine is the relevancy of the results. Search Engine Land has a good report on the new Ask with some initial thoughts on that subject.

Me, I'm going to switch from the search engine I use at the moment (guess which one it is!) to Ask3D, at least for awhile, and I'll see, over time, if it gets me where I want to go. But overall, this looks dynamite--a fresh approach in a world rife with me-too Google clones.

If you check out the new Ask, come back here and let us know what you think...