New York — Ever striving, but still overshadowed by its bigger rivals, IAC Corp.’s Ask.com, the fourth-largest search engine, has a record of coming up with interesting innovations that are often imitated by others in the Internet search business.
Ask.com plans to unveil a new version of its search engine on Monday with several enhancements that seeks’ to make the search experience a lot more similar to asking a question and getting an answer, which it considers significant and believes that it could give its popularity a boost in a market dominated by Google.
Ask.com has sharpened the relevance of its search results, made the engine faster and simplified the site’s layout, said Ask.com President Scott Garrell.
“The strategy from a product perspective is to provide the best answer the first time, every-time,” Garrell said. “Rather than receiving a list of links that may or may not have a relevant response, we want to reduce the distance between your query and the answer you want.”
Cosmetically, the makeover offers Ask.com a more Google-like look, with a homepage uncovered of its colorful icons. The results page is now also similar to Google’s, with links, photos and news displayed in a single column.
The new version is expected to generate more relevant results more quickly, all on a redesigned page.
That history is not stopping Ask.com from trying again. It is the latest effort by Ask to grab a bigger share of the market from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN. Over the years, the Oakland Web site has made a series of overhauls, but has not gained much traction.
The change reverses a redesign last year, in which Ask took the unusual step of dividing the page into three separate columns, known as 3D, for different kinds of content.
The company today is rolling out a revamped version of its search engine, the first major overhaul since Jim Safka replaced Jim Lanzone as chief executive in January. “We have rebuilt the Ask site from the ground up,” said Safka, who previously served as chief executive of Match.com.
As part of the enhancements, Ask.com is adding to its inventory of information it shows, particularly in entertainment, health and food, without users having to click on any links. Searching for actress Miley Cyrus, for instance, automatically brings up a schedule of television shows she stars in, supplementing the mini-biographies that Ask has offered for years.
Behind the scenes, Ask.com’s makeover includes an improved ability to extract data from Web pages; to mix in a wider variety of result types like photos, news, images and videos; and to tap a broader pool of data sources for queries about entertainment, jobs, health and reference information.
With this upgrade Ask.com, owned by IAC, is also aiming to recapture the functionality that gave it its prominence during its heyday: the ability for people to type in queries in natural language. Ask.com is bringing this functionality back via a question-and-answer feature that uses semantic search technology to interpret the questions and return relevant answers found on the Web, Garrell said.
Garell, who became president of Ask in January, said he hopes quick and satisfying answers will tempt more people to use the Oakland-based search engine. In August, Ask responded to 572 million queries compared with Google’s 10 billion, according to comScore, a market researcher.
“We are excited about the improvements that we are seeing,” Garell said, noting that early tests are registering a 16 percent increase in customer retention and a 14 percent increase in customer satisfaction.
Tomasz Imielinski, Ask’s executive vice president of global search, said semantic search is different from keyword search — the most common way to find information on the Internet in that it can understand the meaning of a query and find a relevant answer, even if none of the words in the answer exactly match the query.
This is similar to approaches taken by companies like Powerset, which was purchased by Microsoft in July, and Hakia, a search engine based in New York City.
In addition to the so-called Smart Answers, Ask has created a search engine that scours only question and answer sites. Typing in “breast cancer” will produce results from sites where users respond to inquires from others like themselves.
As part of the redesign, Ask.com’s news section has also gotten a face-lift, with a cleaner design and results from more blogs. The site still includes the AskEraser feature that removes a user’s search history from the company’s servers, and the ability to skin the home page with images of your choice, including your own uploaded images. You can try out the new site features for yourself at Ask.com.
“They are doing some good work,” said Charlene Li, an independent analyst. “It is really impressive how innovative they are with a really small technology team. But is it a game-changer? I do not think so.”