I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on. How about improving search results by 30% instead?
And they've been doing this for a while too. In an interview last year [practicalecommerce.com], their exec mainly droned on about Ask3D, one of their many hare-brained attempts to make an "Ask X", where X is some stupid representation of results for gimmicky or audience-targeting purposes.
In some ways, it's not totally stupid from a business point of view. Google has pretty good resu
I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on.
In fact, there is empirical evidence that supports your idea: the average web search query is about 3 words long (depending on which search engine was examined, this varies +- 1 or so).
Ask.com (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on. How about improving search results by 30% instead?
And they've been doing this for a while too. In an interview last year [practicalecommerce.com], their exec mainly droned on about Ask3D, one of their many hare-brained attempts to make an "Ask X", where X is some stupid representation of results for gimmicky or audience-targeting purposes.
In some ways, it's not totally stupid from a business point of view. Google has pretty good resu
Re:Ask.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on.
In fact, there is empirical evidence that supports your idea: the average web search query is about 3 words long (depending on which search engine was examined, this varies +- 1 or so).
For example, see this paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=281250.281253&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=68253875&CFTOKEN=24736044 [acm.org]