Friday, April 13, 2007
My Google Experiment using ASK.COM as an alternative search engine

In my previous blog entry I wrote about using alternatives to Google as an experiment I was going to try and use ASK.COM for a week instead of Google.

This morning there was a requirement to find a browser based XHTML editor and immediately brought up Google without even thinking about it and stared to search. It was only when I was half way looking through some of the results on Google that my wife reminded me over Skype by asking me how I was getting on with using Ask instead of Google. I quickly shut down the Google window and proceeded to use ASK. The results were very interesting:

  • Both had lots of adverts although they appeared more evident on ASK because they were at the top of the screen. I almost always ignore adverts on search engines.
  • ASK actually had a result for FCKEditor on the first page while Google didn't. I found this strange seeing how popular FCKEditor was.
  • Both brought up Xstandard

All in all Ask did pretty well for itself and brought in some pretty good results, however after using the Google interface for so long it took me a while to get used to Ask.

When I type my wife's maiden name into Google "Karen Nutton" her blog comes up immediately as the first result however Ask doesn't appear to have indexed it yet and it is no where to be found in the results. Also a lot of new blogs I have seen recently are no where to be seen in Ask but appear straight away in Google. It seems as though Google loves blog content more than Ask and is very intuitive at following this content.