Ask.com vs. Google
I’m a big time Google fan but after seeing Ask.com’s ads, I decided to give them a try. So I set my homepage (which is set to Google.com) to Ask.com for an entire week. Here is what happened.
Ask.com Website Preview
Ask.com’s website previews aren’t very useful. It’s more of a novelty in my opinion. Waiting for the preview to show up takes between half a second to a second. That is waaaay too slow. It’s really more of a distraction than anything else. I have a fast internet connection, so clicking on a link seems faster than waiting for that preview to show up.
Ask.com Search Results
Ask.com’s results were not as relevant and they didn’t return as many results as Google does on the same search. I often found myself turning to Google to find stuff that I started looking for on Ask.com. So all that crap about “I found what I was looking for” is just that: crap. But the way they presented results seemed much cleaner and uncluttered when compared to Google. I couldn’t quite figure out why. But I finally figured it out. Ask.com only shows 1 line of snippet for each result while Google shows 2. So that’s something that Google could improve on to make the search results look a little cleaner and not so cluttered.
Conclusion
I’m still using Google as my homepage and search engine. The competition just sucks. You can’t say I didn’t try.
I use Ask.com all the time, have for years with few issues. Mostly, it is because I avoid Google at all costs. Their business practices of farming data and seemingly popping up imbedded in pretty much everything these days causes me to try to do what I can to avoid them at all costs.
I generally start a search with Ask.com, if nothing appears I move to Yahoo (next best privacy ratings after Ask.com), then Google. I end up using Google about 1% of the time maybe as Yahoo tends to give me what Ask.com might be missing. Additionally, when doing a search on Google I temporarily disable cookies, grab the URL, restart my entire web browser and enter the URL by hand. Not much, but it is better than nothing.
I think if their data farming and other privacy infractions bug you, it can be a tad annoying avoiding them, but it is about protecting yourself from their advances and basically doing what you can to protest their bad actions. With the latest statements by the FBI labeling folks who quote the constitution as potential “home bred terrorists” I think watching who watches you is all the more important these days. I take my privacy very seriously, and I don’t think the statement “if yur not doin anything wrong then yu got nothing to worry about” no longer applies, and probably never did.