• by Laurie Petersen , June 26, 2007

We didn’t plan it this way, but our focus on search this month dovetailed with the release of a couple of blended search alternatives — Google’s Universal Search and Ask.com’s new Ask3D.

You can read all about Universal Search and its implications for search engine optimization in greater depth in this issue.

I want to talk about the new Ask.com. For the right searches, it’s a pleasant new experience — compiling relevant links along with video, images, even music. It’s multimedia and highly visual.

The idea is to keep the searching at the top level — as opposed to a more typical search experience of clicking through on text links, backing up, refining the search, clicking through, backing up again and so on.

Being the far-distant fourth in share of search means Ask.com will never be for everyone.  This liberates parent IAC/InterActive Corp. to go out on a limb with something fresh. The new effort reminds me of a more consumer-centric version of the heavily edited specialty engines, such as Northern Lights. (Anyone out there remember that one?)

But as fun as the new Ask.com feels on first and even second take, it doesn’t take long to regress to habit. When you really need to find something, what counts is the breadth of content that is searched, not necessarily the context that someone else has put your search in. I’m already back to Google.

Video searching, meanwhile, remains a whole different picture. As Steve Smith reports in “Not Ready for Prime Time,” searching for video remains a hit-or-miss proposition with different search engines returning a hodgepodge of different results. Google is no better than the rest.

What’s also different, Smith notes, is that the mindset of the video searcher is different than the information seeker. Video seekers are often browsers — “just looking” for new online entertainment options.