Ask.com has compelling features
I wouldn’t normally write a post to promote a search engine over another, but after playing around with Ask.com a bit this morning I felt compelled to write something quick.
Ask has apparently launched a pretty large marketing campaign to gain market share against Google and after watching one of their ads last night I decided to check them out and see what they had been up to. My only familiarity with Ask was from their purchase of Bloglines a service that I’ve been using for a few years now. I was surprised to find some nice things about the service. I would have to say the thing I like the most about Ask so far is their “Save” feature for search results. It’s true that Ask isn’t the first to provide this feature, but they really make it easy and simple to use. Unlike Google or Yahoo, you don’t have to create an account to immediately start saving your results, which is nice and their interface is pretty user friendly. Surprisingly Google doesn’t have the ability to immediately save results immediately to personal folders, they have their “Notebook” application which allows you to store results to notebooks, which is nice, but maybe a little cumbersome for the task. Yahoo provides search result saving, but I don’t really use their service so I’m unfamiliar with how it works.
Some other nice features
- Pronounciation audio on dictionary results.
- Great blog search
- Mobile content search
- Great white pages search