On Monday Oakland, California-based Ask.com, operator of the fourth most used Internet search engine site,  rolled out a major upgrade to its search property aimed at providing speedier and more robust first page answers to users who type questions into the site's search box, in an effort to gain market share from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the three leading search firms. Ask.com said its latest redesign could reduce the number of clicks a user makes while searching, and deliver results from additional Web sources that included new entertainment information such as local cable television listings, at speeds up to 30 percent faster than before. Redesign Looks To Bring More Accurate First-Page Results Although the Ask.com redesign was the first since chief executive Jim Safka took over the twelve year old firm from Jim Lanzone in January, it was the third overhaul in the past three years at the company, which is the flagship technology property of parent company IAC/InteractiveCorp. IAC chief executive Barry Diller restructured the Ask.com parent firm in August, splitting it into five separate companies led by Ask.com. On Monday Safka, who was previously the chief executive of Match.com, said the changes to the search site would bring more answers to the first page of results. "On average, it takes consumers three clicks to find what they are searching for online. Ask.com's goal is to reduce this to one click of the search box," Safka said in a statement released Monday. Ask.com, which has over the past several years seen its share of the United States search market fluctuate between about 4 percent and 7 percent, said the revision launched Monday included search results and answers to natural language queries from an expanded group of Web resources including blogs, music, news, entertainment and images. Ask.com said these new so-called "structured" online resources would also add more health and employment information to its search results. "We have rebuilt the Ask site from the ground up," Safka said of the changes the company rolled out on Monday for the U.S. market. The redesigned Ask.com, which aimed to provide more answers to questions directly within the search results, will be available to U.K. users on October 20, the company said. Television Listings Updated Daily Among Redesign Additions The new Ask.com was able to provide licensed television listings for users asking, for example, "What can I watch on TV tonight?" by analyzing either the user's postal code or the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer the search was conducted from. The television listings provided by the new Ask.com were to be updated daily, and covered upwards of 100,000 programs, Ask.com said. By incorporating new information from Web sources that it said included more answers from sites operated by individuals than  the previous site, Ask.com looked to provide a unique combination of search results from a variety of sources. "Some of the best content is coming from individuals, not necessarily from professional publishers," Safka said of Monday's redesign. The redesign featured a simplified two-panel search page that replaced a three-panel layout present in the old Ask.com site, which had been added in another overhaul in June 2007 as a way to display different types of search results, such as video, images and audio segments, in separate tabs. Including that previous redesign, which was called Ask 3D, Ask.com has by some counts made 11 major redesigns to its search engine since the company was founded in 1996 as Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves was purchased by IAC in 2005 for $2.3 billion and renamed Ask.com, and has spent years trying to compete against Google and Yahoo in the mainstream search market. The latest search engine market share figures showed Ask.com with a 4.8 percent share in the U.S., well behind Google's leading 63 percent, Yahoo's 19.6 percent and Microsoft's 8.3 percent, according to Reston, Virginia-based data from Web traffic analysis firm comScore. IAC Chief Executive Diller Calls Redesign An "Evolution" That same research firm found that 15 percent of Ask.com searches were conducted by users who regularly type out questions into the site's search bar, a figure about three times greater than the 5 percent for users of the search engine sites of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which appeared to be a factor in Ask.com's decision to place greater importance on such question and answer searches in the upgrade launched Monday. Some 572 million search queries were answered by Ask.com during August according to comScore, while leader Google fielded a far greater number, around 10 billion. While the changes launched Monday at Ask.com were major, they could not be considered a complete remake, according to Diller. "To call it an all-new Ask is wrong; it's an evolution of Ask," Diller said in a recent interview. "I think it's going to help us primarily in retention and frequency. That is really its goal," Diller added. The redesign was tested over the past two months by roughly 5 percent of Ask.com's user base, resulting in a 16 percent increase in the rate users came back to the new search site and a 14 percent boost in customer satisfaction, according to an Ask.com survey described by Safka. Ask.com could gain ground in the search market over time with the changes implemented Monday, according to Diller. "I think, hopefully without deluding myself, it will get easier over the next year, two, three," Diller said. Ask.com said that as part of the new changes it had tripled the size of the team selling its services to other businesses, and Diller said the company would initially spend $5 million marketing the upgrade to gauge consumer reaction. The redesign also included a test version of a question and answer service available on the main Ask.com search page, with expanded information coming from Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers. Ask.com Overhaul Returns To Question And Answer Roots The timing of launching the redesign aimed to strike Yahoo and Microsoft during a period when both rival firms were regrouping after a failed acquisition attempt waged by the world's biggest software maker Microsoft. "We view this as a 24-month window of opportunity that we can drive a truck through," Safka said in a recent interview with Reuters. The redesign also featured unspecified changes to the site's search algorithm and increased use of information retrieval technology from Akamai Technologies Inc., Safka said. Ask.com has relied on its search advertising partnership with Google for the  bulk of its revenue, a deal that was recently renewed. "Search revenue for us is very profitable and it's certainly growing," Diller said. The revenue Ask.com earns from every search query rose during July according to IAC. In March Ask.com threw some industry observers and customers for a loop when it was reported that Safka would move the firm toward operating solely as a Web destination targeting women. Among the members of WebmasterWorld, one of the oldest and most popular Web sites serving mostly the technically-savvy people who manage Web sites and specialize in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), early reaction to the Ask.com redesign was mixed. "Their obsession with style over substance and marketing over technology has guaranteed them a rather sad role as the clown of search engines," wrote one member using the handle "Quadrille". Another WebmasterWorld member, using the handle "martinibuster" criticized Ask.com's history of a "heavy reliance on marketing over technological substance and innovation." Related Links :
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