Ask is determine to fight the search engine battle with the big three, which is good. But then it goes and does something stupid as framing search results.

This week Ask.com announced that it is moving into a new data center. The company would not have invested that kind of money if they didn’t plan to keep their own search engine.

This means that rumors of Ask.com becoming a women’s portal or what not can be laid to rest.

New data center

The direct benefits of the new data center spaces are according to Ask:

• The new locations are strategically positioned, resulting in an overall better response time.
• Reliability is higher, given that they are now operating well below peak availability limits.
• Thenew datacenter partners are invested in our success, and consequently are more responsive to change requests.
• Electricity is cheaper and much more plentiful.
• More of our power is provided by renewable resources.

Ask.com’s investment matters for us searchers, as having several search engines around is good for competition and therefore for innovation. In the past Ask has been good at — for instance — user interface innovation.

Framing search results, a big no no

Still, there are also some bad Ask.com news this week. They have committed the cardinal sin of framing search results.

Here’s what we see if we click on a link to Pandia in Ask.com’s search results:

This means that if you click on a link in the Ask search engine result pages, Ask will not open the page directly, but frame it within a page (a frameset) hosted by Ask.

At the top of the browser window there is a frame presenting the Ask search form, some alternative search queries, a link to the Ask site and (thank Ask for small favors!) a close this frame button.

This is only going til make professional searchers angry and confuse the amateurs. We are able to click on the back button and find the Ask homepage by ourselves, thank you!

Searchers not familiar with frames are bound to bookmark the frameset instead of the page they believe they are visiting. They may even link to the frameset instead of the page, or keep on exploring the site within the frameset.

Ask.com should know better! The search engines themselves find it hard to spider sites with frames. Stop it!