Ask.com improves speed, relevance of search results

NEW YORK -- Assuming your company's name isn't a verb synonymous with looking things up online, how do you get Web surfers to not just try your search engine, but also frequent it?

For Oakland-based Ask.com, part of the answer may lie in improving the speed and relevance of search results. Ask believes it has taken steps in that direction as part of a new look it rolled out Monday.

Ask, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, encountered the repeat-visitor problem after launching a version of its search engine dubbed "Ask 3D" in June 2007. With Ask 3D, the site moved away from the traditional method of showing search results as a long list and instead sorted them into three vertical panels, one of which included photos and other multimedia content related to users' queries.

Ask 3D was well-received, Chief Executive Jim Safka said, but it was too slow at downloading visitors' search results.

"A lot of people tried the site, but they wouldn't come back," he said.

This is not to say that Ask has been losing share in the search market. According to analyst firm comScore Inc., Ask's network of sites — which also includes Dictionary.com — moved from fifth to fourth in the U.S. online search market in recent months, surpassing Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.

Compared to the current market leaders, Google and Yahoo, however, Ask's share of searches — 4.8% in August — is quite small.

And so, in a bid to get people to conduct searches through the site more often, Ask has been working on improving the speed and relevance of results since Safka's arrival in January. It is the latest in a long line of overhauls for the search engine once known as Ask Jeeves.

"It wasn't sexy work, but it needed to be done," Safka said.

Ask sped up search result download times by 30% by doing several things, Safka said, including using an expedited delivery system from Akamai Technologies to show results for common Ask searches.

Ask also has increased the number of sites it indexes content from and the amount of material it gets from those sites, Safka said. And Ask has tweaked the algorithm it uses to rank search results.