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Something Ask.com Does Right

posted on August 20, 2007


Ask.com has good news sprouting up everywhere, it seems. Their new feature-heavy, offensive-content-free commercial premiered last week and now comes the news that their new interface, Ask 3D, is useful!


MediaPost reports today on comScore data that indicates that nearly 10% of Ask’s 50 million searchers refine their searches using the left column related searches and zoom related searches. Those 5 million unique visitors represent nearly 3% of the total Internet population. With Ask’s market share hovering around 4%, marked loyalty to Ask’s interface could definitely impact their dominance—the MediaPost article even addresses the possibility of eclipsing MSN.

More good news in the MediaPost article: independent studies show that Ask’s new interface enhances their customer satisfaction:

Ask fared well in the University of Michigan’s recent annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report, as user satisfaction grew from a rating of 71 (out of 100) last year, to 75 in 2007. The four-point increase contrasted with slips in satisfaction for Google, MSN and AOL—and for the category as a whole.

So far, Ask appears to be the only search engine making improvements to keep pace with the expectations of consumers.

Now if only they hadn’t experimented with outlandish and creepy commercials…


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  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    Their biggest challenge is grabbing mind share. I love their new interface, but I still automatically head to Google. :-(

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  • http://www.thevanblog.com Steven Bradley

    Andy I do the same as you. I really like the things Ask has done with their interface, but I’m a creature of habit and generally head first to Google.

    Of course it doesn’t hurt that I have a Firefox extension that lets me first search Google and gives me a quick link to the same search on all the other engines.

  • http://www.cure-for.info Sandra

    That’s a very good job done by Ask.com. I guess if they are able to change a little mindset of people to divert themselves to “ask” it would give them great results.

  • http://bushidoblog.com.ar Bushido

    Sweet look & feel. Regarding to Ask.com’s marketing tactics, wouldn’t you say they got a lot of word of mouth going on with their previous commercial? It could be bad press for them, but it’s viral bad press… and everything viral becomes know by the masses. Some people/sites prefer to have a bad name than to simply have no name at all!

  • Jordan McCollum

    @Bushido—No, I wouldn’t say that. In fact, twice now I have explained why their commercials are bad strategy.

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