I saw a story over at Search Engine Watch Blog about ask.com's rebranding campaign now that they've dropped Jeeves. It mentioned that in the next round of advertising, Ask is going to emphasize their understanding of "concepts" which other search engines can't. For instance, searching for "pimped out cars" will yield results that contain not just those keywords, but other results that also include words like "tight" and "phat."

I also recall how back in the day the big emphasis with Ask Jeeves was in their ability to answer searches posed as normal questions, such as "Where is Fort Knox?" I decided to check out how some Ask results stacked up to Google.





It looks like Ask has managed to provide more relevant results by searching on related queries and displaying them along with other results. The "Narrow Your Search" and "Expand Your Search" sections on the top right of the results page also seemed to contain highly relevant searches that could help you find exactly what you're looking for, and this is a nice feature.

Next I tested the ability to answer questions, a feature that all of the major search engines seem to be trying to solve.






This was by no means exhaustive, and obviously I was picking terms to emphasize the features that Ask has been touting. However, it is interesting to see someone coming up with some more relevant results than Google on some queries. Ask has innovated by searching for related terms, though it'll be interesting to see if this ends up cluttering results with irrelevant entries. They also seem better at recognizing and highlighting answers to questions.

It should be noted that Google has not been stagnant on the search end either. Besides their ongoing algorithm improvements, their OneBox results have gotten a lot better, especially with different tie-ins to travel websites, job listings, and much more.