Find out what’s on US TV by searching Ask.

Not all search engine improvements have to be groundbreaking. Several baby steps may ultimately become a large step for mankind…

Well, let’s not get carried away here.

It is a fact, though, that Ask has not yet given up the attempt at attracting new users through innovation. That’s a good thing, as big companies like Google and Yahoo! need competition to keep on innovating themselves.

Ask already has the best search result page layout on the planet. Now they have added separate TV program listings to the search results.

In the Ask blog they say that:

Our Ask TV listings uses our patent-pending technology DADS (Direct Answers from Databases) to answer queries and questions from structured data feeds and databases. DADS provides highly accurate answers to queries which are relevant to a given topic. Instead of using traditional keyword search algorithms, our technology can deliver much deeper, more precise search results based on understanding of a query meaning rather than syntactical text matching.

This means that you can use the regular Web search form when searching for TV programs. Ask’s algorithm should be able to understand that this is what you want to do.

Ask TV search is still limited to the US, but the coverage is impressive: 10,000 distinct stations and over 100,000 shows.