By Greg R. Notess

I miss Jeeves. When Ask Jeeves dropped the butler and changed its name to become plain Ask.com, the Internet world lost a long-lived icon. For ten years, Jeeves represented the search engine company through major changes to its search technology. In its early days, Jeeves built a question-and-answer database and then matched search queries to one of the answers. It seemed like natural-language searching, as long as you asked the right question. As the web grew, Ask.com added in metasearching and ads, but its database failed to keep up. In 2001 the company bought a new search engine, Teoma, and embarked on significant changes to incorporate it and become the search engine it is today.

With the loss of Jeeves, the new star at Ask.com - or at least their television ads - is Apostolos Gerasoulis, one of Teoma's founders. In one of the ads, Gerasoulis is in the stacks of the library where he thought up the Teoma relevancy ranking and states that librarians love Ask.com. Given Ask.com's small market share, that claim certainly comes as a bit of a surprise. The most important question to ask, then, is just what there is to love about using Ask.com as a reference tool.

A Different View

Just as I prefer a range of print reference publishers in the reference collection, so I like web tools that give different views to online information sources. Both Google and Ask.com use link patterns on the web in the ranking of their results, but they use this link analysis in different ways. To the user, this means that the top-ranked results can be quite different between the two, especially on subject-oriented searches.

For example, a search for 'estimating population growth' at both Google and Ask.com demonstrates this difference. Only two of the top ten pages were listed by both engines. Ask.com put the Census Bureau's site at the top, while not a single record from the Bureau showed up in Google's first ten. Ask.com had records related to estimating the population growth of deer and grizzly bears, while the Google top ten focused on humans. The two sets differ significantly. One is not obviously better than the other, and neither is completely satisfactory, but the example clearly demonstrates how the two search engines rank differently.

Shortcuts and beyond

As a reference librarian, I enjoy creating sophisticated search queries and finding that unexpected document online. Yet what most users like about web searching is just finding the answer. The basic idea behind the original Ask Jeeves is, in fact, sound: instead of a list of links, just give the searcher the answer. Completely revising its original technology, Ask.com has greatly improved the presentation and scope of its answers - now called 'shortcuts' and appearing above both ads and regular results. A search on 'aardvark,' for instance, has a picture of the beast along with its taxonomy, links to 'Key Facts,' and a link to more details on an academic web page. Shortcuts provide answers for queries about movies, celebrities, stocks, sports scores, weather, translation, conversions, and more. Search 'population of Bloomington, IN' to get the response of 'According to recent estimates, the population of Bloomington, IN is 62,560.'

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all have similar shortcuts to answers coming above regular search results. Ask.com probably has more than any of the others and gives the shortcut answers more prominence. Of course, none of them is perfect. For the population question, Google's shortcut answered with 'Bloomington - Population: 251,' going for the Idaho town rather than the one in Indiana (despite having the code for Indiana in the query). Yet a single answer can be more difficult to evaluate, especially when Ask.com fails to cite or even link to its data source, as happens with the population query. Google does better with the citation (even if the answer is wrong) with a source notation of 'According to http://bloomington.id.city-list.com/.'

Beyond shortcuts, Ask.com uses its screen real estate a bit differently. Rather than listing just a few supplemental databases above the search box, Ask.com has a list of search tools on the right with more on a second page. Users can customize the list to put their favorites on the front page. The same space on the right is also used to provide suggestions to narrow or expand the search. In reference interactions, these suggestions can help demonstrate to users ways they can refine their search.

It all comes down to the fact that in this Google-centric age, Ask.com offers an alternate view of the Internet. It has greatly improved what used to be a rarely helpful search tool and now offers several competitive features (check out the driving directions with its autoplay feature). On the other hand, certain areas still beg for continued development. It is unfortunate when shortcuts do not cite a data source. Nor does Ask.com have a comprehensive list of all available shortcuts. Yet with quick answers to queries from 'aardvark' to the 'zone diet,' its refined suggestions, and a different relevance ranking, Ask.com is one worthy reference tool.