• Search Engine Land , Monday, October 6, 2008 2:15 PM

Ask has revamped its interface -- for the 11th time, according to Barry Schwartz -- dropping the third panel (remember Ask 3D?) in favor of an interface that's easier to read and to use. Keeping in line with changes the company announced earlier this year, the engine will also feature more question-and-answer style results, called "Q&A pairs."

CEO Jim Safka said that this focus actually makes the engine about 30% faster than it used to be, as the technology doesn't have to parse as many individual pages and keywords; it can just pull in structured content from Ask's syndication partners like Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers instead.

Nice changes, but Schwartz doesn't think they'll make that much of a difference. "After seeing it, I personally still do not consider Ask.com to be a core search engine and thus do not consider them to be in the race with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft," he says. "In fact, I find it interesting that Ask.com is bring back the Jeeves approach, which failed back then - but they hope will work now."

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