Ask.com: A Great Alternative Search Engine to Google

For some reason, I was looking at search engine stats the other day, and saw that poor Ask.com is sitting far back in fourth place among search engines used in the United States. It sits behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN, with only a 4-5 percent market share, depending on which source you use. No matter how you look at it, Ask.com lags far behind the others, especially Google and Yahoo, which together garner somewhere between 75-85 percent of all search engine usage.

That got me to wondering. I remember when Ask.com was AskJeeves.com, and from what I could remember (and research proved me right on this), AskJeeves.com was around well before Google. So why is Google so popular? Why don't more people use Ask.com than the five percent who do? Why don't I use Ask.com more than I do?

So I decided to see what Ask.com is all about these days, and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised!

In looking back, I think one of the main reasons I didn't use to like AskJeeves.com was that it demanded I ask a question of it. Okay, it didn't really force me to ask a question, but that was the main idea behind Jeeves the butler. He "understood" language, so instead of simply typing in "Canada population," you could type in "What is the current population of Canada?" and Jeeves was supposedly smart enough to know what you wanted, and to find the answer. I remember being a bit annoyed that I would ask what I thought was a perfectly understandable question, only to be asked if what I really meant was... something else.

After a while, that got frustrating. Plus, at the time (mid 1990s), I was much more of a fan of hotbot.com and Alta Vista's search page. And then, of course, once Google.com got going, I - like everyone else, apparently - migrated all my search queries to it.