Search Engine Optimization News Blog

No major search engines consider Ask.com as one of the major threat but Ask.com is determined to make sure that it gets noticed. It is trying its best to survive the competition. One of the recent efforts of Ask.com is to distinguish itself from Google search. It has tried to use semantic search to enhance its accuracy and effectiveness. Ask.com revamped and launched its user interface on October 6. The revamped interface is supposed to be more effective. The new interface is using semantic search method to improve its search efficiency.

At one stage, it was thought Ask.com would disappear from the scene but now it is not likely to give up. The CEO of Ask.com, Jim Safka is making every effort possible to increase the brand popularity of Ask.com. They are trying to make the brand popular by getting back to its roots and reclaim their original identity. Ask.com had its glory too earlier and it was not all sad stories for Ask.com. It was known for providing answers for visitors on major categories including health care, job opportunities, entertainment and reference.

The older categories still exist in the new version Ask3D universal search and along with that the following categories are added – blogs, images, news aggregation, aesthetics, music and videos besides the standard blue links.

According to Tomasz Imielinski the executive vice president of Ask.com’s global search and answers division, revamping has certainly helped the brand to grow popular. All revamping efforts concentrated on reducing the number of clicks each visitor has to make to find the required answers and information. For most of the searches, the answers will be displayed directly so that you don’t have to dig further into websites that contain the answers. Currently, the semantic technology that is used by Ask.com tries to understand the meaning behind the words and questions to fetch the answers unlike the traditional query matching technique. The search results will be lot more intelligent now as opposed to the non-semantic approach. If Google has to adapt this technology in its search engine, all the websites have to rework on their SEO. Current SEO strategies such as keyword density etc will not be effective.

If you make a search about a TV show and its timings you can get the answers directly rather than having to go through websites that contain the name of the TV show that you are searching for. It has been noted that Ask.com covers listings of over 100,000 shows and all these listings are updated daily. Therefore, the search results are more relevant to the search query and this is expected to boost Ask.com’s brand popularity.

This latest effort from Ask.com is to reclaim those visitors who switched to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Now if their search results are improved they will certainly come back to Ask.com. This search engine does not want to stop being an information center but it also likes to attract users for general searches. Though not all these efforts may return a massive change, it will certainly improve things for Ask.com.