Review of Ask X

I’ve been taking a look at the new Ask X and the difference in the search results that appear. So far I’ve been impressed. The new results take on a 3 column appearance as opposed to a 2 column appearance in the old results.

The left column is now devoted to navigational options including keyphrase, results types and options to narrow and expand your results with related keyphrases. Some of these options were available on the original results but were moved from the right to the left side making them more visible. The lists are restricted to just a few suggestions of alternate keyphrases but longer lists are available as pop-up boxes if you click “More”.

For my search, I chose the keyphrase “Kelowna” (my home city) to see what impact the new interface had on the results.

One of the more noticeable changes on this page is the addition of weather, map, time and images down the right column. Some of these options were previously available in Ask but as separate menu items that required an additional click. Ask has really gone a long way in recognizing that for this type of keyphrase, these might be things you might be interested in.

I also noted the removal of alternate organic results (the encyclopedia) from the main list of results. The main list now shows sponsored results in the top position followed by organic results with a few more sponsored results at the bottom.

For a commercial research related query “digital camera”, both sets of Ask results show a product review/prices at the top of the results (no change there) but the right column in Ask X has now added images, dictionary, news and feeds.

What is interesting, however, is that if you do a more specific query such as “Nikon D50” the right column completely disappears. This was a surprise to me as I would have expected to see the new column show images and possibly news and feed results relating to this camera.

Even more surprising was that there were no review or price results at the top when the original Ask results showed these.

In the Eye Tracking II Report: Google, MSN and Yahoo! Compared, Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss talks about the ideal search user experience and the idea that only one result would be necessary as the search engine would be able to disambiguate our intent from a relatively ambiguous query. Well while we are not there yet, Ask’s new search results page certainly makes the leap to doing this on a single page.

Overall the changes in the Ask results are much better for the end user experience, providing the user with much more information on the results page meaning that fewer clicks are required.