Ask Again
This week Ask.com got a new, minimalist user interface that includes search in eight different categories including blogs, video and maps. It borrows from what Google does so well but Ask.com search pages include peripheral results grouped by category (so that web searches for text also show related images, video, music, etc. off to the sides) as well as suggested ways to narrow a search further.
While the clean interface is winning a fair amount of praise, the Ask.com search engine is generating bad press for being slow to return results. In the long term, that seems like a fixable problem. Overall, I think it’s an impressive rewrite with quite a bit of future potential. It’s a good lesson in how a languishing competitor can rally unexpectedly, and on the importance of good UI design.
