Exploring Ask.com
Features and Results | Shortcuts | Advanced | More Tools
Ask.com is an attractive alternative to the big engines of Google, Bing, and Yahoo iin providing search of the main areas: web, images, news, blogs, and videos.
Ask aims to answer questions and does a fairly good job on most of them. Ask began as Ask Jeeves answering questions somewhat manually (with editors behind the scenes developing answers to common questions). It became a full search engine with a database of crawled pages and technology to analyze and group results. This changed in October 2008 when Ask returned to its question-answering roots made possible this time through use of semantic search technologies that assess meaning (to some degree). As well, it still responds to a topical query with "smart answers" that provide, a compact guide to a topic.
Ask today talks about:
- Direct answers from databases (DADS) - Ask will "parse" the search terms into a query that it submits to an appropriate database. Ask about television schedules and it will check Zap2it (eg television schedule for house).
- Direct answers from search (DAFS) - Ask might anticipate the question that would go with the content it has indexed. One example might be "what is the largest city in the world" - Ask has the pages with the answers.
- AnswerFarm is used in the Ask Q&A channel. Of the Q&A services on the Web (Yahoo is another), this is one of the better ones. Ask extracts question / answer pairs from crawling the web. Ask has said, "we’re building it into the largest repository of answered questions in the world." See the questions about tornadoes? This database is now at 400 million pairs of questions and answers.
Features
Type Ahead search suggestions - these may save you time or give you ideas.
Related Searches - Ask presents suggestions for alternate phrasing. Clicking on one of these runs a new search.
Smart Answers - Ask is known for its Smart Answers. These are quick answers to everyday needs. They may be capsule packages of information on popular topics and famous people that may include links, pictures and news. They can also be shortcuts to definitions, driving directions, acronyms and abbreviations, stock quotes (US and UK), maps, weather, movie times and reviews, sports scores and more.
Ask.com Search Results
Ask looks for all the words except common ones. It strives to match on meaning rather than exact text. Like the others, it will pick up singular, plural, and some word variants. For example, for strategies for web searching, you'll see search, searches, searching, strategy, startegies.
Definitions: Ask links the search terms to definitions from Dictionary.com and will show results from a web search on the term.
Smart Answers: Quick answers and content capsules will show first when available.
Sponsored Results: Paid listings - Ask has fewer of these than it used to.
Results: Descriptions of the pages are dynamically generated and will draw from the metatag description for the page, first part of the page, or some salient part of the page that seems most relevant.
Questions about: Questions and answers on your topic that have been culled from the web. Can often be a good starting point.
Related Searches: Other keywords and phrases to try that seem to be related to your topic. Partly based on search history.
Search History: Ask.com keeps a record of searches during a browser session through a cookie. This information is aggregated and may be used to personalize advertisements and possibly content. You can disable this feature by activating AskEraser (see sidebar).
The Choices
Binoculars: Mouseover the image of binoculars at Ask.com to see a
popup with large thumbnail shot of the web page with file size and download
time. There is also a tab for web statistics about the site from Compete.com.
Cached: Ask saves and dates the page. Search terms are highlighted in the text.
Shortcuts
Get answers to day-to-day, ready reference questions quickly.
- define polyglot - gets definition
- acronym ibm - will look it up.
- images roses - brings up pictures.
- map
seattle - get a map and driving directions. US cities only.
- ccs in a teaspoon - does conversions - useful for the metric
challenged.
- movie times - asks for US zip code.
- toronto maple leafs - get information on a sports team
- weather medicine hat - finds current weather conditions
- climate prague - shows seasonal weather. Works for most cities
but not countries.
- calories in
chocolate cake - connects you to the CalorieKing food database
for the information.
Advanced Search
Advanced Search can be reached from the link on the front page or a link under the search box. Restrict results to:
- Words in the title
- Domain or site: such as .ca for Canada, or cbc.ca for the CBC
- Country
- Language: Ask.com is not strong on foreign language content but it does offer a choice of six languages.
More Tools
Images: Ask.com has an enhanced ranking system for image search. It considers the "authoritativeness" of the image within the "topic community." It also has some capability at reading the image rather than just the words around it. (Source: Ask.com Focuses on Image Search )
Video: Ask shows "related search" on its video search with filters to refine by length or fileytype, and suggested related searches. It's somewhat basic compared to video search at Bing, Google, and Yahoo (See Multimedia Search).
Blogs and Feeds: This is hidden under More. The answer to your question might be in a weblog. Ask.com searches postings at weblogs, updates that have been released through a feed, and news sources. Click on Blogs for your search for carbon footprint or use Ask Blogs.