Ask.com, remember them? Well, believe it or not, they’re still the 4th most popular search engine in the UK (behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing) and are the 47th most visited website*, ranking it higher than Apple and LinkedIn.
Unfortunately, ever since the butler-inspired service was introduced, it has been slowly slipping in popularity. There was, as I’m sure you remember, a huge surge in initial popularity. The Ask Jeeves concept of doing searches in the form of an entire question rather than the usual keywords resonated with Internet users looking for something different.
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With the amount of coverage the various search engines have been getting over their rankings and popularity recently, I decided to do a little experiment. Using Alexa rankings, the authority site when it comes to gaining statistical data about websites, I compared four of the major search players: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.
A quick glance at their top 500 list will tell you that Google and Yahoo command the top two positions when it comes to global traffic rank. Therefore it is of little surprise to see both dominate the chart when it comes to reach. Google remain fluctuates on a figure between around 30 and 35%, with Yahoo on a far smoother horizontal bar at around 26% of all internet users who visit the site each day.
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Bing continues to confound its critics and rivals with impressive statistical data just a couple of weeks after it was first launched. In the latest statistics provided by comScore, it has seen a 3% rise in both searcher penetration and share of search result pages, to leave it at 16.7% and 12.1% respectively for the week ending 12/06/2009.
It will certainly be interesting to keep an eye on the rise of Bing and where it eventually levels off. Google of course remain well out in front, but rivals like Yahoo and Ask may well be looking like also-rans if they’re unable to gain back some momentum from the marauding Microsoft Bing.
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After July’s announcement Ask.com has now gone live with AskEraser their new free privacy tool which can be enabled by its users and remain active for 24 months before it will need to be activated again.
This will mean that users can ultimately surf anonymously within the ASK.com search engine. This means that Ask will stop recording the searchers search queries and cookie information (Ip address, user Id, session Id and the complete query text).
If you do use the personalisation features on Ask using AskEraser will get rid of these along with other cookies stored on your computer.
It is unsure if this move will encourage many more users to use the Ask.com search engine over competitors such as Google, Yahoo and MSN but it is a good move and shows that they are making moves to further protect users privacy.
