Answers at Ask.com

This is a shameless plug made in favor of the shareholders (i.e. me) and internet denizens like yourselves.

We launched a completely revamped site today. Most noticeable, is the removal of the left hand navigation frame that contained the "Narrow Your Search and " Related Search" features. Frame design as a whole was streamlined to provide less clutter on the screen and more information relating to a query. In short, we redesigned to focus on providing answers, so people can avoid the constant clicking of a link, then clicking back to return to an initial search result page.

The site now presents "blended results", which mean that each blue link resulting from a search can contain content matches from various sources.

Various agencies reporting on the release liken it to a harkening waaaaay back in the 90s, when it was askjeeves.com and people actually provided answers/results for queries. I suppose it is in a way, but now the responses are fed by various external data sources and our own proprietary search algorithms.

Are we now considered a "core" search engine? That will be left up to the users. We're certainly taking actions on the traffic data, to understand what people are looking for, and how they look for it.

We've also acquired Lexico, the parent of dictionary.com, thesarus.com. and reference.com, so expect to see more integration in the future. These services fall directly in line with the new direction of Ask.com: quickly providing answers to users asking questions.

 

Check the new site out. Send feedback, although I can't guarantee you'll get a response you will feel better after getting it off your chest.

The 'I' stands for 'inability' maybe

Hmm...Fry's has some decent external hard drives they could buy and plug in to assist with space concerns. Maybe that would help.



Weird that I didn't get anything....I thought there was supposed to be results fed in from some other machine cluster. I guess everything is busy covering everything else's search queries.

Cool and not so Cuil

Cool:

Two upcoming games - 'Mirror's Edge' and 'Dead Space'.



I'd mentioned Mirror's Edge previously, and development seems to be coming along nicely. It'll be nice to have another action adventure in the spirit of Prince of Persia. The first person perspective looks sweet.





'Dead Space'...looks like Hostel or what video game version of Event Horizon might be. Early footage released indicates that weapon fire is more realistic in that hit placement determines enemy take-down effectiveness. Meaning: if Mr. Tentacle-Stomach slaps you with his various hurtful probiscii, then bust a few rounds into the appendages that secure him to his perch on the wall.



The game also introduces a mechanism to push the pause button on adversaries. The 'stasis field' tells creatures to chill, so you can regroup and reload.



'Mirror's Edge' comes out sometime in 2008, while 'Dead Space' has a firmer October 2008 shelf date. Both should be good diversions needed until Diablo III is released...which looks like some time in 2009.



Not so Cuil:

A new search alternative launched today. It's called 'Cuil' (pronounced 'cool'). Why Cuil? Based on the page logo, it suggests that they're trying to put the COOL around the I(nternet), but that's just my internal marketing voice pitching ideas to the imaginary VC board. A former Google employee and her husband started the resource with some VC money.



Anyway, being that I work in search I of course peeped it and found that it returned some very odd results...as in...what the hell does that have to do with SFGate?



An article on CNet details how the engine performs:

"...traffic has spiked beyond their expectations. In other Web 2.0 launches, a traffic spike would slow down or crash the service, but in Cuil's architecture, the spike affected results, not speed....Each of Cuil's search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; others are experts on medicine, etc. As these search machines get overloaded, Sollitto said, they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users' pages."

Weird. So if the cluster of machines that's working on Entertainment-related queries is overloaded, then results from the Science cluster will backfill as needed? Hmm....doesn't sound like so much of an 'alternative' as it sounds lame. But, this is launch day. It looks promising: clean UI, straightforward result delivery...if they can get the results to be relevant, and optimize performance to avoid traffic spike result leakage, or perhaps re-architect how results are seeded to complement others, it could be good. Otherwise people will go elsewhere...Ask.com, of course.

How people query now isn't evocative of natural language

'kitchen-floor conflict intensifies as rival house cats claim same empty bag analysis'

By far the strangest query that returned results matching my blog, and where a person actually selected my blog as a result.

What the heck was that person looking for?

It almost makes sense. It sounds like there's been some research done that examines the behavior of cats when an empty (but possibly smelly) bag is thrown in between them. What do they do? Let's find out...amazing! Put the results on the Internets!

We've become so used to entering in a string of keywords (since that's how Google returns results: keywords in indexed pages bubble to the top) in a way that's not how we think or speak.

Perhaps the notion of *asking* a question will become more prevalent in people's minds when conducting a search in the coming months...

Still have my job? Yes. Game room...TBD

If you didn't know, Ask.com announced some layoffs today. We got the details in a nearby bar, where they broke the news and treated us to bagels and coffee and identified us as the 'go-forward' team.

So they can lay off 38 people, close offices in Japan, Denmark, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, telecast the announcement that we'll be focusing on our core users, but do they really need to lock the doors on the game rooms?

Honestly, after announcing the layoffs and the shift in company priorities, couldn't they at least let people bust a few rounds off in Call of Duty 4 or shred some notes in Guitar Hero 3? Were they concerned that some of the ex-employees were going to get sticky fingers after getting the shaft?

But then, I think...I'd rather have a job right now than an Xbox 360. Still, the empty veal pens provoke strong pangs of empathy. Anyone working in the Bay Area or who has been 'downsized' or categorized as 'redundant' knows what I'm talking about.

New Ask feature: upload your own skin

Ask.com just released a new feature, which allows you to upload your own image to be the skin (or background) for the site's homepage. Here's one I uploaded...a photo I took on a small island off the coast of Belize.Check it out. Just click on the 'Skins' button to get started.

I'm making good on my commitment

I mentioned a while ago this book, The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen. I've not been writing much because I'm trying to burn through this thing so I can comment on this...how should I describe it...provocative expose on how the digital age, Web 2.0, the internet are causing a process of cultural retardation.

The basic premise is that the nature of the internet is allowing people to dilute truth, and we are to blame for our own infatuation with ourselves, hence, the cult of the amateur. He raises some valid points about Wikipedia and its 'questionable' editing and (non-existent) vetting process, but then he states that Craigslist causes people to lose their job because of the fewer dollars spent on advertising.

My garage sale posting must've done horrible things for DoubleClick.

I'm withholding final judgment until I finish, but I find it difficult because as I find myself agreeing with some points, for the most part he sounds like an elitist who wields his research like a Protestant orator on the pulpit warning of the fires of hell that will consume non-believers. He delivers bitter tirades on bloggers and his generalist derisions liken them to negligent parents. In his eyes, every blog's link subsequently linked to another blog (aka: an unreliable source of information) muddies the water of truthery as the ensuing circle of misinformation threatens to drown us in confusion and mindless noise.

What's that, you ask? Does Andrew Keen have a blog? Why, yes he does! That magnanimous fellow conveys a upon himself a mantle of praise and humble awareness (he earned his stripes in Silicon Valley, and nonchalantly deemphasizes their significance while simultaneously giving a knowing wink as they offer credence to his tale), while providing links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble where you can buy his books. I think he's secretly jealous of the Daily Kos and is trying to generate swirl for himself.

It's an interesting read for certain, and he does circuitously make the point that you need to be careful about what you find as "fact" on the internets, but for the most part it's a hypocritical and somewhat myopic treatise with periodic nuggets of critical thought.

If you don't like what's out there in the ether, then stay out of those neighborhoods and stay abreast of events from reliable sources. It's like TV. Don't like it? Don't watch it, but stay aware of it...the whole "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" bit. Blurbs from Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt...of course you could always see who made the edits before you quote the site's articles in your term paper.

More later. Must finish reading tirade on the evils of YouTube and search engines and how horrible it is that Clear Channel or Viacom, two of the largest communication and media giants that control cultural mediums such as radio, cable stations, movie production houses, internet properties, and more have to "let go" of smaller underperforming stations. It's too bad that a handful of companies can't maintain a stronger grip on the vehicles by which we receive our news and entertainment. I'd prefer that one company have control over all my media because one opinion is better than a varying point of views.

Down J...must...reserve...judgement...only halfway through...maybe he'll start proposing solutions or alternatives as opposed to pointing fingers.

Experience new Getification

So what's the big 'search' difference between Google, Yahoo!, and Ask?

The new TV spot perfectly depicts how Ask continues to innovate how to deliver search results to users.

Notice no ambiguous "algorithm" references, or cameo appearances by Kato Kalin.

While Google continues to push ahead (and away?) from search and diversify its products, Ask has moved beyond just serving up 10 blue links.

Well the 10 blue links are still there...but did you see the Binoculars next to each link? If you hover your cursor over one, you get a chance to preview the page to see what it looks like. If there are any videos related to your search results, and you hover your mouse over the thumbnail, you can see about 3-4 seconds of the video to see if it's what you're looking for.

Pretty cool stuff. The approach is basically to provide your search results AND a variety of other related search possibilities, so that you locate what you want fast, so you can spend less time finding the right query terms to use to produce the search results you need.

Try it out. Interested in the new Apple iPod products and price cuts, as highlighted by Steve Jobs yesterday? Peep the search results from Ask.

Lindsey needs her cookies deleted

Lindsey Lohan. She's like that favorite drink you like to imbibe when you go out, but you know you have to watch it when you drink it, because it totally rips your sanity and reason away. Tossed. Out the door. You've hit rock bottom, and start high-fiving everyone when they don't want to be high-fived, and you keep telling the same joke over and over again...to the same person.

So, being the party elixir that she is, and just after leaving rehab, she tears off and starts high-fiving everyone by drunk-driving with a gram or two of blow in her pocket, engages in a vehicular chase with a relative of a former employee, and gets busted by the po-leece.

I'm going to make a guess that her booze bracelet was singing Inna Godda Da Vita during the whole chase.

But the good news is...and this affects anyone who uses the internets...Google, Ask, Yahoo, and Microsoft are all implementing stronger privacy methods to anonymize your search records on their systems. Here are the essentials:

Google: Modifying web search cookies so they expire in 2 years, assuming the visitor doesn't return to the site, otherwise the cookies push the expiration date out each day. In my opinion, this is somewhat meaningless...who are the users who access Google once in a 2 year period? 5 Eskimos and a monk in the Himalayas? Search records will become somewhat anonymized after 18 months (the last eight bits of your IP address will be made opaque). This means that your IP would be identifiable in a pool of 256 others.

Yahoo: They will anonymize data about searches and searchers within 13 months after each search is performed.

Microsoft: Users will be able to choose whether they want to receive ads tailored to their Web surfing habits. The company will also sever the links between information about a computer and the Web searches carried out from that machine after 18 months.

Ask: They're implementing AskEraser, which is a preference tool that allows you to not have Ask store your search information. They'll keep search records intact for 18 months, after which they'll disassociate the search history from the IP address or cookie information.

Now if only scienticians could figure out a way to mask Lindsey's drunkenness and public outcry for a hearty slap in the face and a hug to follow...but then, what else would we focus on: the worst U.S. President in history tethering our blood and money to the petroleum industry while simultaneously face-stabbing the global perception of America whose wounds and scars won't heal for decades to come? Nah...that's too much of a downer and I have to think about stuff that's not fun to think about.

Was Paris chasing Lindsey? That would be so cool if those two tramps got in a drunken, hair-pulling, fight and then Fall Out Boy stopped by to play a few songs as, like, y'know...a soundtrack? That would be sweet. I would totally put those pics on my MySpace page.