The search engine Ask doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Pandia talks to Gary Price, Director of Online Info Resources at Ask about the soul of Ask and how this search engine works to improve your access to online information of all kinds.

It’s all about simplicity

Gary demonstrates several Ask features, explaining enthusiastically about present possibilities and future plans.

While he takes me through one tool after another, I get curious about the big picture: There’s a lot of innovation going on at Ask and it is obvious that they pay close attention to user experiences. What is it that guides them in this work — their soul, their credo, their mission?

“My impression is that it’s all about simplicity,” says Gary. “We want to save people time and aggravation.”

Google’s mission is widely known: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Yahoo’s mission is not equally famous: “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. Ask’s mission is all about keeping it simple, like Gary suggests: To deliver the most relevant answers to your everyday searches. What does this mean and how will they achieve it?

Gary explains: “Most people do simple searches. They put an average of 2.8 words in the search box and very rarely go beyond the first page of search results. So we have answers ready for them there: In addition to the regular search results, the results page has smart answers based on semantic analysis along with relevant image, video, music, weather results and more.”

Ask 3D: Smart answers, Web 2.0 and more

So is Ask following Google’s lead and moving in the direction of universal search?

Gary is happy to explain that Ask did this before Google launched their universal search. “We developed this way to display search results first through the publicly available Ask X prototype (December 2006) and then Ask 3D (June 5 2007).”

3D stands for the three pane view that you see on the search results page:

The first pane is for interacting with the search box to widen or narrow your query. In some cases, you also get suggestions for related names.

Here’s an example: If I search for Barack Obama, Ask suggests narrowing my search with queries like Barack Obama biography, Barack Obama keynote speech and Barack Obama’s religion. I also get suggested queries to expand my search, like Michelle Obama, Illinois senators and black senators.

The second pane offers search results, Smart Answers, Smart RSS, and more.

Smart Answers often appear above the first regular search result. These are suggested answers to your query. My search for Barack Obama produces a smart answer which is an excerpt from an Obama biography with a link to the entire article and smart links to other relevant sites, like his official web site, the Obama campaign site and Obama articles from imdb and Wikipedia.

If I search for Danny Sullivan, Ask knows that he has a blog and so the Smart Answer is replaced by Smart RSS: The headlines of the latest posts at search Engine land and a drop-down menu to subscribe to the feed.

Ask analyzes my query and tries to present the information I am looking for, not just web sites that contain the words I search for.

So if I search for sketches of cats, I get three image results before the regular search results, along with a link to more sketches of cats.

The third pane is where you will find content from other relevant sites, like videos (from Blinx), music (from iLike), encyclopedia (from Wikipedia) and more.

Gary explains: “The Ask ‘Morph’ algorithm looks at the search query and based on its words and context, provides not only web results but a variety of results from disparate info sources. I think it’s easy for the info pro to see the variety of information that can be made available here.”

He shows me by doing a search for my home town: Oslo, Norway. The third pane displays a selection of images of Oslo from Ask’s image index, current time in Oslo (and you can see the seconds ticking), Oslo info from Wikipedia and the weather in Oslo.

The content of this pan will vary with the query and Ask will add new types of content as new kinds of services appear. Many of these are Web 2.0 services where the users produce, publish or tag the content. So if Ask chooses the right kind of partners for this column, they will always have fresh, relevant content to offer.

What’s in it for you?

Ask’s mission is to deliver the most relevant answers to your everyday searches. For the end user, this translates into a search engine which is supremely uncluttered and easy to use and which delivers quite advanced search results to simple queries.

The three pane solution makes the search result page easy to navigate and, unlike Google’s universal search results, it is easy to distinguish the different kinds of results (image, blog, video, etc.)

After my interview with Gary, I’m left with loads of information about Ask, so there are more posts in the pipeline with information about other Ask services.