Ask.com pushed out a major update last night. The update overhauls their interface and dramatically changes the way search results are presented. The main page has become extremely clean in comparison to how it used to look, and it now also supports the use of some pre-defined skins. Supposedly the ability to use your own images instead is coming soon.

The homepage, after I applied a skin to it

Here's what they have to say about the new results page:

This isn't just about getting more information; it's also about getting the right information. Accordingly, Ask3D literally morphs with each query you enter. No two searches are the same, so why should all search pages have the same stuff in the same order? We customize each page for each different query, based on relevance, but also based on what previous searchers on Ask found valuable for that query (or one like it).

Some people who see Ask3D may initially be taken aback. It looks different than other search engines (which look curiously like they did a decade ago). Some might say there's too much going on. We feared the same thing. That's why we tested Ask3D for nearly 6 months with 5% of our 25-30 million monthly users. Simply put, these people came away happier with their experience than "regular" Ask.com users - they had lower abandonment rates, higher pick rates, and higher frequency of use.

There are also fewer ads on Ask.com than any other major search engine. That gave us more room on the page to devote to content and tools.

The new results page is surprising. For example, a search for chicago yields a page with a lot of information on it. It's good and bad. The bad is there's just a whole lot of information. But the good is I have a bunch of links at the very top to the map, jobs, weather, seasonal climate, and more. Then the rest of the page has the weather, the time, information about the band Chicago, a link to Wikipedia with a snippet about Chicago, images of Chicago, suggestions for narrowing and expanding my search, and more. Start typing in the search box again and you see suggestions in a dropdown menu too. They say the suggestions are based on what other users chose when looking for the same terms.

In all Ask.com has been managing to stay relevant and innovative at a time when they're clearly the underdog. They started with conceptual searches that could interpret your search and offer relevant suggestions for other searches, then they launched AskCity which changed the mapping game by allowing you to draw things right on the map and share these marked up maps with others, and now they've made this big change. At the very least they're keeping the larger search engines cautiously looking over their shoulders.