Ask Spidering

Maybe we're about to see a new Ask?

[BillyS]

If I had to pick a favorite / underdog it's Ask. Based on my non-scientific testing, Ask has some very positive things going for it...

It's able to interpret what you're looking for better than anyone else. It's really good at guessing what you're after.

The results are (generally) less spammy than what I see elsewhere. BUT (it's a big one) Ask's results are stale - very stale.

294 - March
940 - April
1037 - May
1278 - June
3290 - July (projected)

This website only has around 1,200 pages. So I'm starting to wonder:

Is Ask finally going to come around and provid "fresh" results? If so, they might be a contender. They are doing a lot of advertising in the NY Metro, which is a very expensive market.

[Frequent]

I have one site that's been getting a lot of traffic from Ask over the past few days.

The odd thing is that the section of the site getting the traffic is a basic Amazon data feed store so it's pretty dead as far as main stream search engine referrals go.

Freq---

[eeek]

Ask has some very positive things going for it...

Really? I haven't seen anything positive about Ask. In fact I don't know where I'd go to find a worse search engine. Jeeves must have taken the database with him when he bailed.

[vite_rts]

In case any one from ask is reading this thread,

I really think they should start accepting URL submissions like the 3 decent search engines out there,,

They spent more money advertising that search engine on UK TV than i've seen just about any internet company spend ,, all for what!

[eeek]

All for what? As a prelude to bankruptcy is my guess.

[BillyS]

>>I haven't seen anything positive about Ask.

Let me guess, poor rankings for you = poor search engine.

I haven't seen any published data on relevence, but a couple of months ago I conducted a test (which consisted of a series of about 10 questions from a grade school homework assignment) Ask did the best job of interpreting the search query and returning the appropriate results.

And for the record, I probably get less traffic from Ask then I should. But that doesn't make me sour on their search engine.

[vite_rts]

Erm, thats not it, for me anyway, i've actually had 3 websites showing on pages 2 & 3 of their SERPS,, but the thing is,,,,

I know a 1 year old website in one off my categories that has an Alexa rank better than

ASK.co.uk

I know alexa rankings are not definitive, but within the top 100,000, they're quite good,,,,,

[RichTC]

im seeing improvements in ASK - could be a dark horse yet but it has little reach thats the only problem i think

As for spidering it has purges on some of the sites we work on but i recently noticed one site getting a real pounding by the bot, i mean very heavy spidering, normally where ive seen this in the past the site in question has improved in the ask search results - we will see this time.

In conclusion, i notice ask is increasing its bot activity over all so perhaps it is about to deliver something.

Who knows?

[ddogg]

I think ask is the worst search engine personally. They have some nice commercials though.

They need a much fresher index to start..

[BillyS]

>>They need a much fresher index to start..

When I started this thread I mentioned heavy spidering by Ask. Based on recent queries, Ask is now showing fairly fresh content for me. In fact, I've got more pages in Ask than Google right now.

[extremegolfer]

Ask needs to grows its database and update itself a lot sooner. Although I shouldn't complain as my site is on the first page with my keywords.

[BillyS]

There is no doubt that Ask is getting fresher with their index. If they keep this up, we could have four SEs in a real race.

[Bewenched]

Our site has been getting some spidering from ask as well recently, it would certainly be nice to be able to submit a list of pages instead of the bot having to wander around the site.