I think they're improving alot! Personally I like ASK and have it set as my home page. The new home page is pretty cool imo. I don't get any traffic from them either - but I still use them.
They do have a cool new front end and are trying a big marketing push in the US, but I do not receive much traffic from them either. I hope they make it as it is nice to have a couple competitors to keep Google in check.
Well I'm watching India V/s England match right now on TV and the side-screen has ASK.com Advert . so probably yeah someone must be using it. match is at oval .
Ask.com is merely a large link directory for Barry Dillers IAC Corp. Underwhich he owns. hsn.com realestate.com servicemagic.com hotels.com ticketmaster and many more Its one huge spamonopoly and the last thing they care about is anyone but themselves. You can see all the sites they own at the bottom of realestate.com If you dig hard enough you'll uncover one of the largest link spammers in the world. And Google knows about it and does nothing. Realestate.com spends $6,200,000.00 on Adwords so you know Googles not going to hurt that revenue. Ooopps I slipped
Hmmm what do you know ask.com Revenue: $107.30M Reported Ad Spending: $6.30M Spends $100,000 more than they do with realestate.com Spend $6 get back $106 I'd do that all day every day.....
i feel bad for ask.com. they had their little TV campaign a few months back. I know that had to cost them alot of money. If you read Revenue magazine they show the stats for search engines last month. Google was at 61% and ask.com was 3%
I haven’t used ask for a while now, not since they used to put ads on TV in the UK under the name ASK JEEVES. there catch line was something like "ask jeeves a question" Funny thing was if you went there and asked a question like "why are strawberries red" it would return results for the words "why", "are" and "red" separately and not for the whole question. It was a search engine anyway not a question answering maching so it pointless telling people to "ask questions", thry oviously wont get answers they are expecting. It used to be one of the worst search engines IMO. It might have got better.
I've never liked it as a search engine. I disagree with the poster who said it takes time to become a Google or Yahoo. It takes a good way of indexing websites to become a Google or Yahoo. Time is actually the enemy. Google practically popped up overnight. One month I was using Alta Vista or Metacrawler for my searches, the next month I (and just about everyone else for that matter) was using Google almost exclusively. If something works a lot better than the competition, it will gain momentum like an avalanche.
google is as popular as it is because it was basic and straight to the point from day one. you goto google.com and see just a box to enter your search term. not a bunch of useless entertainment ads and popups