With the majority of us who follow the search engine industry focusing on Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search, quite often; the "second tier" engines remind us they are still a viable alternative to the big 3. Such is the case with Ask Jeeves.
WebProWorld Today, Michael Jordan will yield the normal amount of search results on the left-hand side of the page. On the right side of Ask's SERP there are a two lists, one inviting you to Narrow Your Search (zooming in), while the other list, Expand Your Search, offers users the option of widening their search parameters (zooming out). To give an idea of how the Zoom function provides suggestions, the following are the suggestions offered by the Michael Jordan query: Narrow Your SearchMichael Jordan Born
Air Jordan
Childhood Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan History
Expand Your Search
Chicago Bulls
Andy Beal offers this, "You may think that Zoom is similar to Google Suggest or other technology, offered by smaller niche search engines such as Vivisimo, but it is clearly beyond current offerings." Daniel Read, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves, offers some thoughts about their narrowing/widening technology, "Zoom brings recommended queries to the user-suggestions that allow searches to be refined, or associated topics explored, with a click of a button. Zoom guides users to exactly what they are looking for fast." Not content to offer an effective search refining technology, Ask Jeeves also introduced Web Answers. As mentioned, this feature takes advantage of Ask's Smart Technology in order to provide answers (in the form of search results) to questions like "John Battelle seems to support these thoughts by saying, "My take on this is simple: Ask is resurgent, it's got a strong service, it keeps innovating, and it's got IAC behind it now. Don't expect them to stay 25 points behind Yahoo and Google for long." Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for latest search news.
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