Ask.com still indexing pages 301ed three years ago

at this point, I'm astounded

[Robert Charlton]

<rant> Just thought I'd check out the new Ask.com, which is very pretty, and tried a search that reminded me of a problem I'd forgotten about...

They are still indexing pages that were 301 redirected three years ago, redirects which have been followed by every other search engine in the known universe.

I've mentioned this two or three times before over the years, at conferences or on forums, and extremely nice Ask engineers have asked me about it, promising to clean it up, and I've given them the information, expecting it was a minor glitch and would be fixed. This is now a bad joke.

Anyone else seeing this problem? This is ridiculous. </rant>

[steveb]

"Its time for Ask to throw in the towel."

They have.

Their pitiful "search engine" is nothing but an excuse to use adwords.

[sublime1]

301, 302, 404, 410, 500. If I could figure out how to monetize traffic from Ask.com errors on pages that never existed or went away years ago, I would make as much as I do on current real organic search from Ask.com: very, very little.

(Sorry, I used to work there, and am partially responsible for failure to handle errors. Then again, I left almost 5 years ago...)

Oh, and have you seen the "Chicks with Swords" ads? #*$!