Ask3D: Discovery Engine?
Ask.com, the 4th largest search engine just released a new look and a boat load of features to its results page. ResourceShelf has a nice run down of the new release here and the news has lit up Techmeme as well and here’s a detailed review on Search Engine Land.
First, congratulations to the Ask team for a very very nice product. The user interface is clean yet allows for additional contextual results across media types. This seems to be very useful, especially for well known search terms. Say you are looking for new info on Maroon 5 - you can now get all of the results - Bio, Images, Event Search, Encyclopedia, Lyrics, Popular Tracks and related names, in a very non-intrusive way. In other words, if you want to explore, its all there and if you want to ignore it, it’s not competing for your attention. In particular, the contextual integration with iLike for this use case is very well done. Another broad search test for “Pizza” also showed good results with additional categories such as Business Listings, Shopping, Videos. You get the picture.
My first impression was that the new Ask.com is now as much of a discovery service as it is a search engine. For the example I used above, bringing in data such as events, lyrics and images into the fold means that there even more of a dynamic nature to this than ever before. The interaction design and final destination points across each result type made me realize that instead of fighting other search engines on relevancy of data already indexed on the web, there’s an opportunity to service those users that are searching for information that may not have shown up as yet. A concert, a new song, a new pizza restaurant, what ever. To me, this new design is well suited to this notion.
2 suggestions:
First: Expand the recommendation engine. For example if I did a search for events for Maroon 5 in Boston and there’s no events, show me where they are playing anyway say in a 100 mile radius, along with the no results found.
Second: Michael Fergueson, Ask.com’s user experience guru, does cover some important points about how this design allows for better user retention and repeat visits in this interview with Andy Beal. However, I think Ask might still be closing the interaction loop prematurely. RSS can be an effective tool to continue the engagement with the user beyond the search results page. Since you know I’m interested in a Maroon 5 show in Boston, give me a feed to subscribe to so I can get a heads up about an event in Boston when it gets announced.
Looking forward to using this more when outbound RSS is enabled. That’s when it gets very relevant to our user community.
Nice job!
Sameer
technorati tags:RSS, Search, Discovery, Ask.com, Ask3D, ZapTXT
