AskJeeves gets smarter and shows thumbnails of web sites

Ask Jeeves adds "smart" links and thumbnail previews of result pages.

By Lars Våge

(July 12 2004) AskJeeves, the search engine with the third largest search index has some interesting news.

Smart Search

Already in 2003 AskJeeves introduced different kinds of special links in their result pages under the headline Smart Search. Now more of these are added.

The idea is, they say, to "take search beyond the blue links" and for most of the smart hits, you don't have to type a keyword to activate them.

If you type e.g. "Troy" a box with info about the new movie about the Trojan war will appear on top of the page. If you are not interested in the movie, you simply ignore the top box.

The point is that AskJeeves tries to guess what you are searching for and sometimes the "smart hit" is right.

Google and Yahoo have tried similar technologies during this year, but generally they require a special trigger word (i.e. an additional keyword that narrows down the search).

Thumbnail pictures

AskJeeves now also includes thumbnail pictures from Thumbshots.com of the web sites in the results pages. These are called Binoculars and show up if you point your mouse to the binocular icon that is displayed to the left under the hits. Or rather under some of the hits, because the Binocular function is still in beta and there are not thumbnails available for all web sites.

Before launching the Binoculars feature, AskJeeves had the well known testing company Veritest check to what extent users found the thumbnails to be useful.

This test is available in its entirety and may be interesting for many reasons. It show beyond doubt the test subjects (87 persons) were very fond of the Binoculars function. They experienced that they had to click on 50% fewer hits to find relevant information.

Veritest has earlier done tests for search engine companies like Google, Altavista, and Inktomi.

Personally I too enjoy the Binoculars even though there are not very many of them yet. It is nice that you get to choose for yourself if you want to see a particular thumbnail or not.

In e.g. Alexa's version of Google and in the Open Directory, it is either thumbnails or no thumbnails, and loading pictures does take time. The same applies to Wisenut and Vivisimo, where the relevant pages are loaded into special frames on the search engine results pages.

Anyway, AskJeeves goes on fighting for a bigger share of the searchers even though the Veritest test shows that only 3,5% of the test subjects use AskJeeves as their first choice.

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