Pete Trainor, an ex-TEQUILA\ colleague and founder of the phenomenon that is the Pete Collective, passed a link on to me today for the next generation search engine from Ask, "Ask X".
Looking pretty snazzy in the usual web2.0 style it offers pretty much the usual search engine experience from the start- single form in middle of the page and not much else - you know.
But once inside the results it shows signs of some interesting features which make up for the fact that, as is often the case, it’s results themselves aren’t actually as good as google.
First thing to notice is that the whole site appears to be using AJAX to deliver results once the page has loaded intially - and not just results, but also search tips as well, which are automatically written into the left-hand column on the page as you type, allowing you to filter down your search results to the exact thing you want - which is a nice feature and really helps you to nail it down to what you want.
Another nice point is the way that it allows you to save your favourite results into a "mystuff" area, which seems to work a bit like del.icio.us for search results. This may be something that’s been in Ask for a while, but i’ve not seen it before.
There do appear to be PPC listings in the results as well, which is only to be expected, and they’re in the same place on the page as most of the other sites.
This follows on with something Pete also pointed out…
"They’re in exactly the same format as Google… same colours… same weighting… I read somewhere that all the search engines are going to start mimicking Google’s style because it’s what people are familiar with." (crikey pete, you’re right! :P)
Which I suppose makes sense, but makes it hard to see how you would differentiate yourself from the big-G if you end up copying they’re style to a t?
It offers the other must-have search components also, Video, Images and, via the "more" tab, News, Blogs and Shopping. Obviously Ask don’t rate blogs as being important enough to warrant being on the top-level navigation straight away! Content for these sections is loaded in with Ajax as well, making for a very nice, smooth transition between the different areas.
Videos are provided via Blinkx and then you’re directed through to the relevant site which contains the video content.
I’ll keep playing with this for the next few days or so and see how it stands up.
For me, the AJAX is interesting, especially with the recent (2006) talks of ajax affecting banner impressions on yahoo!
Howard
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