Ask.com Web Search
OK, so we keep hearing about all the new things Ask.com is up to (like Ask3D), but, in my opinion, they still are missing the key thing: quality results. I don’t care how pretty the look and feel is if I can’t rely on the results.
Try, for instance, a search on Ask.com for the single keyword “Lucene”. The first result in my browser is for a link to http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html. A link to the Query Parser Syntax shows up as the second hit, before the actual Lucene home page. The third hit is for the real Lucene URL: http://lucene.apache.org/.
A few points here:
- Lucene hasn’t been a part of Apache Jakarta for a LONG time. The first link is a redirect to the real site.
- There is no reason why the query parser syntax should show up as a higher ranking than the main site.
Now, compare that w/ Google’s results. The first hit is actually the Lucene Java implementation, which makes total sense because the Lucene Java project is the most well known of all the Lucene projects and is the “flagship”. However, there is a “sub” result to the first hit on Google which is a link to the top level Lucene project, just like Ask’s hit list. The Query Parser syntax doesn’t even show up in the top 10 for Google and I would agree that it wouldn’t be in my top 10 of results for such a generic search.
Now, a few positions may seem minor and all, but in my mind, these ones are quite obvious and if they don’t do well on the obvious things, then what about the tougher ones?
