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July 20, 2007
In another bold move, Ask.com has announced plans to add an unprecedented level of privacy control to the little search engine that could. The company calls the new feature AskEraser and it lets users control exactly how much of their information is stored by Ask… and how much is forgotten:
AskEraser is scheduled to be deployed in the U.S. and U.K. by the end of the year with a global rollout planned for early 2008. I’m really glad to see Ask.com make this move. There’s a chance - albeit a slim one - that the move could spur other search engines to add similar functionality. While I’m not holding my breath for Google or Yahoo! to follow suit, the fact that Ask.com is making such a thing possible just might help put more pressure on the bigger guys to improve the level of privacy control they offer. There are still things about Ask.com that make it impossible for me to use it as my primary search engine. I love the Ask3D interface. I love the “tools” Ask.com offers. I like Ask.com’s algorithm that they so adamantly advertise. I don’t, however, love Ask.com’s index:
So while I really am a big fan of Ask.com, I’m simply unable to use it for anything but recreational searching. And while I’m not sure the strange $100 million advertising campaign the company has launched is really helping with their search share, it’s more likely the search results themselves that are holding Ask.com back. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them… really!
Comments:
3 Comments posted on "Ask.com to Put Privacy Control in User’s Hands… Now All We Need is a Better Index"
Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask.com Jump on the Privacy Bandwagon on July 23rd, 2007 at 8:37 am #
[…] signs of change to every Internet user. Even though I think Ask.com is the only search engine going far enough by giving users complete control and making anonymous search possible, I’m glad to see that […]
RustyS on July 24th, 2007 at 8:53 am #
Same here. Ask seems to have a pretty solid algorithm. But without the massive indexes (and the ability to quickly search them) like Google and Yahoo have it’ll always be hamstrung. Index size has always been one of the greatest things that have masked Google’s occasional weaknesses IMO. When it comes to less-popular, less-linked, long-tail keywords their algorithm is no better (in fact sometimes weaker) than the competition as it’s all about indexing full, on-page content then. But if you have an index with 20 billion pages (or whatever it’s up to now) versus only a few billion pages you’re going to be FAR more likely to at least find something of remote value to the searcher.
Derick on July 24th, 2007 at 12:32 pm #
Ask.com’s spidering policy irks me. They “trust” their spider to discover all of the sites on the net. I would think by now they’ve realized that it doesn’t on its own. Maybe Google and Yahoo! wouldn’t fare much better on their own, either. But both of those companies (and Microsoft, for that matter) allow direct submission of URLs that, at the very least, make the spider aware of a site. There are a lot of great small, niche sites out there that Ask.com simply isn’t aware of because they haven’t encountered any of the small number of other sites that link to them. Post a comment
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