Hacker News Reader

Comment by Surio | Hacker News Reader

[Somewhat relevant, somewhat off-topic]

Commission collections and ethics aside, I actually cannot understand the venom towards Ask (its search results). I believe in keeping web searches open with multiple choices made available to users, so I actively support all viable alternatives (meaning I use Ask, Blekko, ddg, lycos, yahoo (bing) among others instead of Google for regular everyday searches). Ask search results are very much comparable to Google's, i.e., the search is not "inferior" as claimed.

As for ads, google's adsense ads are just as much in-your-face as the others (ymmv), so don't think this point is such a big thing either as claimed.

View on HN

I'd never used Ask, so after reading your post I compares a search for "cuda device to host memory copy" [1] and [2]

On google I saw no ads, and the links on the first page of results usually contain the search term.

On Ask there are ads, and they look very much like search results - there's no coloured background to identify them as such - and the search results contain irrelevant links to other Ask properties like "Can I Copy From Youtube? | Ask Jeeves" and "How Memory Stick | ask.co.uk/how"

Personally I won't be switching from Google to Ask.

I'll admit we might see different things - let me know if you'd like screenshots.

[1] http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cuda+device+to+host+memory+... [2] http://uk.ask.com/web?q=cuda+device+to+host+memory+copy

Hi,

Good show. I checked your links on Maxthon [my IE without the IE baggage] and on Firefox (default browser with ABP add-on) for comparison.

1. On FF I have ABP installed, but there were no ads on Maxthon either for Ask. Is it due to "search bubble" or something else? Not sure. However, I too use uk.ask.com for my searches like you, so the 'bubble' should be the same for me as well. Hmmmm.

2. I got those two false positives also. But the rest of the search results were similar between both search engines (SO, rice.edu, stanford.edu, sourceforge, NVIDIA). I'll admit that I would have simply filtered those two anomalies visually and not given it a second thought. But wouldn't you say, search-for-search, the landing pages were pretty similar in the results returned (barring those two stupidities)?

Here's the first screen I see on ask (on a 1050px high monitor): http://imgur.com/MWk9wm2

And here's what I see on Google: http://imgur.com/nalUhES

Managed to find a suitably large monitor. Here's my landing page for comparison. On Opera with Adblocker installed. I get the same results on Maxthon that has no addons to block ads. Let me know if you want to see Maxthon screen.

Ask: http://i.imgur.com/rX72PDd.png

Google: http://i.imgur.com/Q0BusaH.png

Interesting. I guess with an ad blocker, Ask isn't so bad.

Yes, definitely been an interesting discussion. Thanks :-). Even more surprising for me was Maxthon's ad-free results as well.

FWIW, I'd definitely recommend looking into other alternative search engines like those I mentioned earlier. Usually my opera's speed dial default engine is dogpile [http://www.dogpile.com] that curates Google, Yahoo and Yandex results into one search result on one page. Definitely also worth looking into if you're interested.

I use Bing often, as I love Bing's homepage. Oh! those panoramic pictures. You got to give it to them. They definitely got that UX right. ;-)

Edit: Blekko and DDG are quite fab. And for an old contender, Lycos quite literally, rocks! Try them.

I agree that the vitriol towards Ask is unwarranted, though I do find the inclusion in the Java install to be very much in the realm of crapware.

Ask gets money by tricking you to click on not-quite-relevent ads, whereas Google gets money by providing revelent ads, no tricking involved.

You can't really split Ask in half and talk about the quality of its search results vs the ethics of the company.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/askcom-google-sign-35-bil...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com