Rambling about Ask Jeeves

I've noticed that the Ask Jeeves crawler is quite aggressive. I launched a new site and Ask was all over it. It was the second crawler to hit, but it crawled the deepest and fastest.

So, I thought to myself, "Maybe this search engine is doing something cool and I should check it out".

So I went over there and tried some searches. I guess the search results were OK. I don't think they were as good as Google's results.

What they are trying to do is create a real Web 2.0 search experience, with lots of JavaScript functionality. I don't like that type of ornamentation in the first place. What is worse is, they do it badly. They use a "fade in" effect for the search results. Hello, this is a web browser displaying text. This is not developing a film or tuning in a radio signal. Fade in is an effect that has no place on websites. We have incremental page drawing, not fade in.

And other annoying JavaScript stuff.

Yahoo has too much other stuff on their result page. I'm sticking with Google for now as my main search engine.

I'm curious what they are thinking over at Ask Jeeves. Are they thinking that "Web 2.0 results pages" is enough to distinguish themselves and become a player in the search business?

I get the same for my site, with Ask crawling even deeper than Google. But I agree that the whole Ask interface is very personal. Most people (inc me) dont seem to like it. And I really hate the adverts they have in the UK, which basically infer that every other search engine is an advertising conspiracy and that Ask is the only true unadultered site (how far from the truth!!).

That right there would turn me off... a search engine which will crawl and index anything without any kind of reputation(links) is worthless...ask may look pretty but as an seo they send me nothing and as a searcher I use Google... I used Ask years back and hated it, I am not about to go back

I have to disagree about the look and feel of the site - I think they're using Ajax functionality to make the browser feel like a proper application. We're all too used to how browsers work to realise that they don't work like normal pc type applications.

I think this is a good thing - a step forward...

Shame they're not listing any images from my site tho

ASK deindexed my complete website...... why so?