I keep reading articles talking about how Teoma and Ask Jeeves are becoming the "fourth force" in the SE wars. I've tried looking for results for my domain and have been appalled. ask.com sucked down 800,000 pages in March. We have 1880 pages indexed and none of them seem to be from 2005 - they're all from 2004. Are we alone in this? We put in a crawl-delay of 100 seconds because we couldn't see the benefits of serving that many pages and having that kind of results.
Yes, Ask and Teoma results are pertty outdated. Their index stinks. With just effective marketing strategies, they're still in the business.
Well, I know they just got bought by IAC (who owns Expedia and CitySearch and Ticketmaster and so on). But I keep feeling like Google doing so well means that journalists need somebody else to write about.
Although Ask doesn't have a huge user following, but they are supposedly the 5th major engine. If you're serious about relevant results, use one of the metasearch engines. Jux2 and others are good. I've been beta-testings an engine lately, and its almost ready for launch, but I'm not allowed to post it publicly till its officially launched. PM me if you ever wanted to search Web, Images, News, Word, Audio & Video on the best Metasearch Enigne. Google? Well, I'm starting to hate and ditch google in every possible way now. For many reasons, google sucks lately.
One of the biggest problems with the search engines is that they're trying to make sense of lots of data. I find that I'm looking for something very specific but there's no easy way to wade through tons of results. That's where directories are helpful. I use Hotscripts a lot but even that has issues with people sneaking stuff in.
If you are doing a business search (Search for some business, company or a business related search), MSN works like a charm. If you're looking for in-depth information for some non-business related stuff, Google should display all the junk. Yahoo, as always, is between both. I'd still suggest you to use a MetaSearch Engine for better results. They remove dupes and sort it efficiently.
I've never used AskJeeves, but I do see the occasional referral from them. Perhaps this most recent buyout will mix things up a bit.
I have been getting a lot of traffic from my google adwords through Ask.com. They have also started airing TV commercials again here in the US.
I think that the biggest problem with G right now is their ongoing war against SEO techniques, which is causing their SERP's to lose their relevance. Yup, I agree. That's how Yahoo! got started: providing a useful and easy to navigate Internet directory. Combine their directory with their improving SE SERP's and I think Yahoo! will be the undisputed king of the Internet portal game real soon. As always, IMO. AmCy
Not true... Ask has got a very advanced index and it's getting better all the time... IMO, Ask is returning better results than most engines at the moment.
Ask shows a lot of ads before you get to their results, so even a top ranking is like a 5th ranking there. Teoma is decent but nobody knows about it, and if you use it for a little while, you just end up heading back to google, yahoo, or msn. I think a lot of their traffic comes from people who've seen a recent article about them and just checks them out because of it - that or metadata searching. I've yet to find anybody who uses AJ or T as their primary search engine.
I have read that Ask Jeeves is the 3rd largest of the search engines. I find it hard to believe that there isn't more exposure or information about AJ.
Ask is actually 4th or 5th. I believe its in the UK that they are 3rd. If you sell to the UK, you cant ignore Ask.
It's 4th... Market Ownership in the UK Google.co.uk - 61.49% Google.com - 7.39% search.msn.co.uk - 7.07% www.ask.co.uk - 6.40% uk.search.yahoo.com - 5.30% search.wanadoo.co.uk - 3.28% search.yahoo.com - 2.66% www.ask.com - 2.00% search.msn.com - 1.35% www.altavista.com - 0.62% Stats true as of 21/5/2005
Nice Stats SE! Although technically its 3rd as Google occupies the top 2 spots. Thanks for posting that.
Oh, and I should clarify that those stats are for the number of searches performed, not not number of visits to those sites.