Ask’s Search Box Continues To Expand
Gary Price just alerted me to some more cool stuff Ask is doing, with their great move to bring you more info just from the main search box. A while back, they started delivering a few image thumbnails if you searched for anything with “pictures” or “images” in the regular search box, figuring you didn’t know about the image search engine, and it must have worked real well, because they’ve started expanding the concept. You can make these searches right from the web search, not even needing to specifically choose the image search, getting the pictures of dogs or images of cats you were probably really looking for. Only Yahoo comes close, and Google actually links to image search, but doesn’t show images (even though it does show them randomly at other times).
Here’s how they’ve gone further: Search for “logos of new york mets“, and you’ll get various images that contain the Mets logo. Take a look, because the results are different from “images of new york mets“, which contains pictures of one of the players. Oh, and the Mets are doing just fine, thank you very much 
This goes beyond different types of pictures: Try “drawings of harry truman“, and your thumbnails are all hand-drawn portraits. Get a littls fancier, and you can find “paintings of jfk“. Or, if you are a real art buff, you’ll like being able to specifically find “watercolors of flowers“. I’m just mad fingerpainting doesn’t rate its own smart answer. They’ve also enabled this sort of search for sketches and sculptures.
I’m convinced someone at Ask is terrified of the next Big One hitting the Bay Area, since they’ve built a great earthquake resource. Search for earthquake and you get the four most recent. Add your zip code and find the most recent seismic events in your area (scary, unless you live in NYC). But the real treat is clicking that “See All Earthquake Activity” link, which shows off the excellent Ask Maps by mapping out quakes across the globe, with the bigger quakes shown radiating outward, doing god knows what.
Thank god they didn’t go the tasteless route. Now, some Ask engineer is staring obsessively at this, waiting for the next San Francisco earthquake, just so he can say, “I knew it!” five seconds before a server rack crushes him.
Another cool thing: type in “zip codes” and a place, and you’ll find its zip code (enormously useful in some desperate situations). You have to like how, if you type a common place name, like Portland, Ask shows you the most popular, while listing all the others. Yes, there are 11 Portlands and 22 Springfields (not including this one). You can compare it to Google, and you can see what a difference a little extra work makes.
The coolest thing has got to be this:
Yup, active satellite and doppler maps of any area in the country. Just search for “weather in new york” or “weather in 11367″, click on the link, and enjoy the sweet maps and weather forecasts. All I want to do is blow this up on a wall, stand in front of it, and annoy my wife all day while pretending to be a weatherman.
USA Today has an innaresting article on Ask. It includes these tidbits:
Teoma was a research project at IBM that morphed into a Rutgers research project that turned into a failing dot-com. It got bought by Ask.com for $4.4 million — an investment banker’s pocket change — in a deal announced two hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
…
In February, Lanzone got a lot of attention because he dumped the cartoon Jeeves butler mascot and changed Ask Jeeves to Ask.com. But, again, the significant action took place behind the scenes: At the same time, Lanzone turned off Ask’s technology and began to power Ask.com with Teoma. So now Ask.com IS Teoma. If you type www.teoma.com into your browser, it will take you to Ask.com.
Search connoisseurs began to notice. The Teoma/Kleinberg method of grouping sites first is letting Ask.com do some things that Google can’t. One example is its Zoom feature. Search for “Ayn Rand” on Ask.com and you get related subject areas such as “objectivism” on the right, even though those subjects might not have the actual words “Ayn Rand” in them. Type the same search in Google, and you get a list of sites that have “Ayn Rand” in them. Google finds key words, not concepts.
Interesting stuff about Teoma, which is basically, the 3.0 of search (assuming Google is 2.0), and why 95% is good enough.
“Google actually links to image search, but doesn’t show images”
Am I misunderstanding you?
When I search for stuff like “pictures of A”, “images of B”, “photos of C” I consistently get three image search previews, which I can click directly, which is exactly what I want (after all, I used the web search, not the image search). Granted, “logos” doesn’t work.
Comment by Tim | October 12, 2006