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back to article Ask.com rolls out new algorithms, skins

Take that, Google. On Tuesday, Ask.com unveiled a revamped version of its online search engine, the web’s fourth most popular behind Google, Yahoo!, and MSN/Live.com. Dubbed Ask3D, the new Ask.com offers a fresh interface and an underlying search technology designed to give users quicker access to the data they’re looking for …

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  1. Chris Cheale

    Actually...

    That's really quite nice - the background images are fairly sizable (well over 100k) but, by default they're not on; they are optional.

    Remember that at least part of the reason that Google got where they have today was their uncluttered search page with minimal images; makes it really fast to load (and in the early days the average connection speed was probably somewhere around the 50k dial-up mark).

    The new Ask interface follows those early Google principles while giving a bit of optional extra "fluff" for the iPod generation - as long as you don't disable JavaScript in your browser of course.

    "Hi I'm a Google, and I'm an Ask" ?

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Looks lovely but...

    So I give it a go, searching, as I imagine rather a lot of techy types might, for c#.

    All of the adverts are for C#, but not a single one of the first page results or left bar links.

    That's that for me then...

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  3. James Anderson

    Sponsored Adds not clear.

    My gripe is that the sponsered adds are differnetiated only by an ever so slightly yellower background colour. Bit sneaky if you ask me.

    As for the "C#" - blame Microsoft for giving the language such a silly name.

    If you really want to give yourselft a hard time try looking for documentation on display "hex" character using the "curses" terminal library. At least in google you can narrow it down with "topic specific" like "linux". Ask seem to have attempted something similar with "domain" but there are no hints as to what the valid domains are.

    Its "born again google" -- almost as good as google but without the "do no evil" sh*t*.

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  4. Steven Knox

    Two thumbs up.

    It's definitely much better than Google for contextual searching!

    I wanted to look up historical population estimates for many different countries. I typed in "historical population by country" and the left bar links helped narrow down my search to exactly what I was looking for. Google just returned a seemingly random list of population sites usually specific to one country or another.

    Plus, I'm using Opera, and the interface is clean and effective, without any noticeable bugs -- inidicating that Ask appears to get standards compliance.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fixed pixel fonts == lose

    Call me when they've hired some geeks and fired the new media/web 2.0/<insert crap here> consultants.

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  6. Paul

    opera...

    "Plus, I'm using Opera, and the interface is clean and effective, without any noticeable bugs"

    I must be loading the Irish version then, because for me in Opera up with the mouse wheel scrolls down and down scrolls up.

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