Ask.com Unveils Faster, Smarter Search

Ask.com hopes to take advantage of all the shenanigans between Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google to get a bigger share of the Internet search market.

Internet search engine Ask.com—which, earlier this year, announced plans to make itself over as a women’s site (we kid you not)—has rolled out a new version of its Internet search engine, which it promises offers better search results and is faster than ever before. And Ask.com is hoping to use the hubbub and uncertainty surrounding search competitors Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to capture a bigger share of the online search market.

“Initial feedback from customers testing the new site has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Ask.com CEO Jim Safka, in a statement. “By listening to our customers and giving them what they want, we’ve already seen a 14 percent increase in customer satisfaction.”

Ask.com’s search engine employes semantic search technologies that the company says break new ground in Web extraction, ranking, and search results, and more innovations are expected to appear in coming months. Ask.com also says it has improved download speeds by up to 30 percent, so users get their search results faster.

The company also claims its improved search results are producing a 16 percent improvement in customer retention—and that, in turn, means the company earns more money from advertising placements on its search results pages.

Incidentally, ad placements on Ask.com are handled by…Google.

Ask.com says its search results are more likely to me relevant than other search engines, in part to extra emphasis it places on Entertainment, Health & Nutrition, Jobs, and Reference categories. Ask.com has also simplified its interface and integrates abroad range of content directly into its search results pages.