{"id":425,"date":"2007-05-08T13:50:35","date_gmt":"2007-05-08T13:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/2007\/ask-the-algorithm-sucks\/"},"modified":"2013-08-26T18:16:09","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T23:16:09","slug":"ask-the-algorithm-sucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/ask-the-algorithm-sucks\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask: The Algorithm Sucks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aks.com, the “new” (reborn<\/a>) 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<\/a>. But don’t buy it, it’s all crap<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We went to Ask.com (now Butler-free<\/a>!), and were rather surprised. It looks slightly better, that wasn’t it. The problem was, we couldn’t get a single<\/em> meaningful search result back!\n<\/p>\n

Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and everyone else has the official download location for EasyBCD<\/a> 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<\/a> not<\/em> turn up the official download site in first place, it didn’t turn it up at all!<\/strong> Not only that, but the first result wasn’t even to NeoSmart Technologies – it was a review<\/a> 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?\n<\/p>\n

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<\/a> which never<\/em> – not once – linked to EasyBCD.
\n \n<\/p>\n

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!\n<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[377,378,379,380],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-ask","tag-askcom","tag-jeeves","tag-search-engines"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xDa-6R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2357,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions\/2357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}