InsideGoogle

Some More Ask Smart Answers

Got word of some cool smart answers Ask.com is running.

The first is all about events. Presumably leveraging the fact that Ask and Ticketmaster are under the same roof, if you enter a type of event, like “hockey”, or a concert, and a location, you’ll get a smart answer with some upcoming matching events. Click to see more and you’ll get forwarded to Ask City local search, and see on a map all the events in your area, with options to buy tickets through Ticketmaster, of course.

Try it out:

“hockey new york city” (notice how you can norrow it by borough)
“concert los angeles” (note the suggestions of Los Angeles other than California, as well as the categories of music)
“comedy boston”

This is an excellent case of the sum of all the parts making for something great. Ask has been building something special with their smart answers, making for a search engine that is more than just about ranking pages from 1 to 10. You gotta love where they’re going with all this.

The other thing is that if you search for kids books (or anything like that), Ask tells you to go to the search engine for the Internation Children’s Digital Library. Google’e been pointing to other companies for a while, although less and less as it gets more competitive, but something about the way Ask does it, with a prominent and descriptive smart answer, just reminds me a bit of Miracle on 34th street.

I’d love it if Yahoo pointed users at Google Groups when it was clear they were looking for something only a USENET archive could provide, or if Google Images pointed to Flickr when it was clear that whatever the user is searching for won’t be met by Google Images. Confidence in your company’s product is important, obviously (hence dogfooding), but if the user isn’t satisfied with the experience, they’re leaving anyway.

Who’s more likely to keep using Google Images, the guy who can never find anything good there, or the guy who gets told, “We don’t have that, so check out Flickr. Just don’t forget that you will always find it through Google, even if you don’t find it at Google”? The answer should be obvious.

February 5th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Ask, Search, General | one comment