Aks.com, the “new” (reborn) search engine poised to take over the world. Champions of personal privacy. Protectors data. Finders of answers, and the future of the web. Or at least, that’s what they’d have you believe. But don’t buy it, it’s all crap.
Ask.com always sucked. From when Jeeves the butler was still young and had a spring to his step, their results were never on-par with MSN, Yahoo, or fledgeling Google. They preyed on the new-comers to the web, giving them a corny man in a pinstriped suit and coattails bobbing on their screen, pointing them in the direction all the time. Ask claims their new algorithm is awesome – God only knows how much money went into the advertisement campaign alone.
We’re sorry to break it to you though: Ask.com’s search results are just as terrible – if not worse – than they ever were.
We went to Ask.com (now Butler-free!), and were rather surprised. It looks slightly better, that wasn’t it. The problem was, we couldn’t get a single meaningful search result back!
Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and everyone else has the official download location for EasyBCD as the number 1 result. And why shouldn’t they; it’s where all the EasyBCD links point to anyhow! Not only did an Ask.com search for EasyBCD not turn up the official download site in first place, it didn’t turn it up at all! Not only that, but the first result wasn’t even to NeoSmart Technologies – it was a review by Jason Olson (of Microsoft) way back when EasyBCD was first released. He even links to the official download page there! What about second place though?
Nope, not even there! That one is a download link to EasyBCD 1.2 – from ages ago as well. And yes, you guessed it, it links to NeoSmart Technologies as well. 3rd place? NeoSmart Technologies at last! But don’t get your hopes up, it’s a link to the homepage which never – not once – linked to EasyBCD.
The rest of the results are just as ridiculously off-topic or inapplicable – including dozens of spam entries from splogs across the web – the kind that don’t get any incoming links from anywhere!
Ask.com may have done away with the Butler and his moustache, but they haven’t done anything to be worthy of even a fraction of the attention their false advertising got them. Their site is still clunky (who still uses frames in search results nowadays!?) and their algorithm….. it just sucks.
You said it, ASK sucks big time.. these stupid guys should hav invested money in building a better algo rather than on advertising a crappy service. Ask spiders are really lazy and never index new stuff on the web. They revolve around only a few bigshot websites and everything else in their database is damn old. They don’t index new stuff as they cannot detect spam from non-spammy pages. As they rightly said in ‘thealgorightm.com’ – their algo is blind as a bat.
I have a gripe with Ask concerning my company’s site (I never use the search engine personally). Last year we redesigned our website, a complete overhaul. Our site (lemonlaw.com) ranked #1 on Google, MSN and #2 on Yahoo for many terms we optimized for, but this example specifically sticks to the term “lemon law”. After the redesign, our rankings got even better overall. On Ask however, our site disappeared completely. Owning the domain “lemonlaw.com” alone should get us somewhere, but we don’t even show up on ask’s results for that term. How can that be? It makes absolutely no sense. All of the other terms, for example – specific state lemon laws, such “pa lemon law” and “nj lemon law”, they all are in there to some extent, but are so far down the list it’s ridiculous. We did all the right things – kept page filenames the same, did 301 redirects for any pages that we did have to change and worked with an SEO firm to do all the right things and cleaned up a lot of little problems. Ask dropped us out of their rankings for just about everything right after the redesign.
To this day, you can go to ask.com and type in the term “lemon law” and not find our site in the results. We are considered, in our field, an expert in lemon law and have been for about 15 years. So what, now that our site is more professional looking, we get excluded? Our site has tons of information on lemon law and by their own description of their new algorithm, we should rank somewhere in there if only for the information contained on our site.
What’s even worse (for us anyway) is that our biggest competitor just recently redesigned their website (to compete with us), again a complete overhaul and their site has not lost one spot in placement. Do they like them better than us? Do they feel their site is more informative than ours? It just doesn’t make sense to me. By all rights, both of the sites should be up there.
I haven’t found a good explanation for this yet and Ask does not want to provide any information whatsoever. They refer me to their webmaster guidelines, of course. There seems to be no good reason for this to happen. If anyone could explain it, it’d be greatly appreciated.
Ask.com sucks, when you download there tool bar It redirects you every fucking time.
although i am a ask.com lover i find it funny that they didnt spot this page and indexed it #1
ASK.COM IS THE WORST!!!! I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO FIND ANYTHING ON IT. they somehow hijacked my internet explorer seach function from the default google seach and life has sucked ever since!!!! i finally figured out how to change it back and will NEVER use ASK.COM AGAIN!!!!!!!!
Ask.com is still hijacking the default search engine from people’s browsers. If it was a quality peice of software, they wouldn’t have to do that. Ask seems intent on STEALING market share by duping naive users.
Here’s some info to get rid of it:
Internet Explorer 6 (presumably 7 too)
1.Go to Control Panel in Windows itself
2.Click on Internet Properties
3.Click on General
4.Click on Search settings
5.Set new default and delete ask.com
Here is a link from ask itself, giving a removal tool:
Link to the executable file:
http://media.ask.com/media/toolbar/tools/AskSearchUtility.exe
I have an intense hatred for ask. Many applications come prepackaged with the ask toolbar, and its very easy to accidentally install the toolbar, especially if you’re used to cliking next,next,next when install reputable software.
Even if ask created an algorithm better than google’s I’d still use google because the company is run by profit whores that don’t care about the user. So I won’t give a * about them.
I can totally agree with this post. Ask has to be the worst search service in the history of the internet. I, like a previous poster, had trouble getting a web site redesign re-indexed by Ask. Google, Yahoo, and bing picked it up in a few days, Ask it took almost a year before they finally picked it up.
That Ask toolbar also sucks, that alone is enough to steer me away from them.
Good post
ask sucks big time. they never answere my direct question. I don’t think they know the difference between thier ass and face
I cannot find nothing in Ask.com search… And they use aggressive inflitration in your computer installing as a default wrobser withouth asking permission.
Ask toolbar sucks and once it is downloaded it is hell to get rid of…
You said it!! Ask sucks ass! Can’t believe how crappy this search engine is. I type in Google Translate into Google Chrome, and Ask.com pops up with everything EXCEPT Google Translate. Talk about a joke.
Then I type in ‘how to remove Ask.com’ and all I get are sights with downloads so that if I were gullible I would now have vicious viruses on my computer. Good job ASK!!