Ask Morphs Into Ask3D

If anyone was wondering why IAC put up a $100 million marketing budget behind Ask.com, the relaunch of the search engine as Ask3D should answer that question.

Ask Morphs Into Ask3DAsk, which they have dubbed Ask3D. It uses the company's new Morph technology, which means each search result page will be different depending on the query a user submits. If you think this sounds a little like Google's universal search approach, dismiss the comparison from your mind. Compared to what Ask is doing today, Google's universal results look like the algorithm vomited data all over the SERPs.

Gary said the new Ask brings a lot to the end users without a lot of effort. The Ask home page offers visual cues to visitors, with icons for various searches displayed above the search box. You'll see those icons again after doing a search.

As you type in a query, the search box lists suggestions; this was prototyped with AskX. A suggestion can be clicked to kick off the search. That brings back the three-columned search results page, for what Gary called a lot of information on simple results.

The left column contains the options to narrow or expand a search as desired. In the center, sponsored and organic search results are on display. If a relevant Smart Answer is available for a query, it will show up at the top of the column.

Over on the right column we see where Ask's Morph technology comes into play. Depending on the query, those results could contain images, videos, news, even Ask has been a much more compelling search option for the past couple of years. The Ask3D update has made it even more of one now.