Ask goes back to its roots, trying to give regular answers to natural language queries, while Hakia tries to become the new Ask. In a market dominated by one search engine, such attempts do matter, Pandia argues.

Imagine the following: Due to the financial crisis, Yahoo! fails to stay afloat, and is sold to the highest bidder. If that is Google, Google will close down the Yahoo! search engine and replace it with its own. If it is Microsoft, Microsoft will close down Live Search and replace it with Yahoo’s.

Then the world faces a search engine duopoly with Google and Microsoft as the only main contenders left.

Monopolies are bad for search

Does it matter? Yes it does. Mainly because searchers need alternatives, and no search engine covers the whole of the Web, and definitely not in the same way.

Secondly because search has become the life blood of the Web; having too few search engines channels too much power to one or two players.

And finally because oligopolies like these stifle innovation. Google is a great company, and a very innovative one, but it needs someone to kick its butt to stop it from becoming too complacent.

And if you don’t believe us, look at Microsoft, which — due to its virtual monopoly — seems practically incapable of delivering a decent operating system. To the extent the company does innovate in the OS field it is mainly by copying the main remaining competitor: Apple.

Having that company as Google’s only serious search competitor gives serious cause for concern.

The alternatives

There is only one serious, independent European owned contender left, namely Exalead, but Exalead is mostly using its web search engine to sell its enterprise search services.

Furthermore, Russian Yandex and Chinese Baidu are mainly focusing on their home markets. Their strength is their knowledge of local language and culture, not the currently dominant Anglo-Saxon and Continental markets.

And then there is Ask , the artist formerly known as Jeeves.

The fact that Ask is an American company matters, because it is easier for an American company to challenge the big three, as it already has a position in the American market. This is why it matters that Ask.com survives, and that it continues to invest in its own search engine technology.

Ask.com innovation

In March we reported that Ask was planning to abandon its search engine.

Fortunately that has not happened, at least not so far.

Instead Ask announced several improvements to its search tools this week, indicating that they are still in the race.

Ask has introduced three new answer technologies: DADS (Direct Answers from Databases), DAFS (Direct Answers From Search), and AnswerFarm.

In practical terms this means that Ask follows up the ancient tradition of Ask Jeeves, enabling searchers to ask natural language questions and get regular answers in return.

When we asked “when was the battle of waterloo?” listing number 2 included the following response: “The Battle of Waterloo is considered as Napoleon’s last battle. It was fought on 18th June 1815 in Waterloo which is located in Belgium.” Fine!

DADS makes use of structured databases like TV Listings (which are much easier to interpret semantically) and uses them to generate responses to relevant questions.

DAFS has a much harder task, namely to understand what text on a regular web page is about and see if those pages contains answers to relevant questions.

AnswerFarm tries to identify answers and questions found on web pages (like in FAQs). If it does find such questions and answers, if will include them in the result listing instead of the regular headline and text snippet.

All in all the technology seems to work well.

Simplified result pages

We are slightly disappointed to see that Ask has abandoned its three column result pages.

The previous lay out was pleasing they eye, and made it easy to identify different types of content.

A narrow right hand column used to present relevant images, an introduction to a Wikipedia article, and blog, maps and video search results etc. These elements used to vary according to the search query.

That column has gone and is replaced by alternative search queries. To find alternative media, you have to click on one of the tabs over the search result listings: Images, News and — this is the new feature — Q&As.

The present design is more like the one used by Google.

There are probably two reasons for this lapse towards conservatism:

• Like Google, Ask has probably found that users get confused if they are presented with too many alternatives, but more importantly:
• the new pages load much faster.

Indeed, Ask makes a point out of this:

“You told us you need faster answers. We’ve listened, and redesigned our site to make the new Ask.com lightning fast. Give it a try, we think you’ll notice the difference.”

For users surfing without broadband, the difference might be noticeable, and modern web users hate to wait, even for a fraction of a second.

The other alternative: Hakia

All right. Let’s say that this doesn’t work. These are tough times. Ask may fail. Yahoo may fail. Are there other search engines that can become serious competitors to Google and Microsoft? And by a serious search engine we mean one with its own search engine index.

Well, Hakia has for a long time explored natural language and semantic search. It is probably no coincidence that Hakia put out a press release on the same day as Ask presented its new features.

In its press release Hakia presented its new interface:

“For any given query, the first tab – All Results – provides a three-column overview of the Web results, including results from hakia Credible Sites, images and news, if available. The right-most column is reserved for ads, in order to provide a clear, unbiased presentation; the goal is to reduce clutter that blurs focus from the search.”

In other words: Hakia does what Ask used to do: Delivering different content types i different sections on one unified search result page.

They even has an “Ask” button instead of a “Search” button.

Ask may dream of becoming the new Google. Hakia wants to become the new Ask!

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