Still Ask-ing the Same Old Questions
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | October 9, 2008 | Share This
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Earlier this week, Ask.com unveiled a new, stripped-down and speedier redesign of its search results that the engine hopes will help it better compete for market share.
Gone is the Ask 3D results panel which brought up relevant audio, video and image files in a sidebar next to classic link-and-description search results. 3D drew a lot of critical praise after its launch last year but unfortunately, the short term traffic boost didn’t ultimately convince
In its place, Ask has integrated a new Q&A tab that aggregates subjective Q&A discussions from sites such as Yahoo! Answers, eHow and Answers.com. For an example, see this list of responses to “What is the best HDTV?”
They also added a new “Answer” icon that pops up when the engine knows a definitive answer to a question, like “How Many Ounces in a Liter?” or “Who is the President of the United States“.
The redesign was accompanied by a series of bizarre new TV ads which are debuting to a limited audience this week. Here’s an example, featuring an eigth grader with an extremely obese woman grafted onto his back.
Um. Right. So what exactly were they thinking when they decided to give me that particular nightmare? Let’s hear from the ad agency that birthed it (via AdWeek):
“We wanted to get back to the brand’s heritage which was questions and answers and give the brand some emotion,” said Doug Raboy, managing partner of Hanft Raboy, who had worked with [Ask.com CEO James] Safka in his past roles at Match.com and AT&T Wireless. “We wanted to give the brand more of a pulse and make it feel a little more human.”
Not exactly sure the ads accomplish that last goal – with their weird monotone delivery these ads feel about as human as a David Lynch movie. But whether or not you like the creative, the company’s focus is clearly back on differentiation through natural language searches - answering the world’s questions instead of organizing the world’s information.
Full disclosure: I spent more than three years with Ask.com during the “Jeeves” era. I witnessed first hand what the Q&A positioning did to the way people looked at the site, and saw how hard the company tried to shake the perception that it was better suited for settling bar bets than serving as a day to day search engine. And that was in ‘02. At this point, searchers are more sophisticated - they have a lot less of a need to go to a site that “speaks their language”.
In the end, all the change feels like a step backwards for Ask. The results don’t seem much faster or more relevant than they have been in the past. They’re certainly less interesting. And perhaps most disappointing, almost every results page I’ve seen feels overloaded with ads.
Take the example below, which was pulled from another one of Ask’s new TV spots, this one dealing with a cop on the prowl for some cougars. The spot ends with a screenshot of the reply page, showing the results for the query “Is COPS on TV tonight?” As you can see in the screencap from the commercial on the left, the first result is one of Ask’s new “Answer” results, immediately followed by a OneBox result describing COPS. On the right is the actual result set, which starts with three paid search ads, pushing the COPS info down almost below the fold:
While the result set is essentially the same, the added paid search links make the page feel much less relevant to the question.
Topics: Ask.com |
Is that uhh..interesting photo above correlated with Cops? If not, interesting choice of imagery!
Nice post.
Thanks for sharing with us.