Ask.com gets a Facelift

Search engine Ask.com has had yet done makeover in order to boost their user base, reports BBC News. The relaunch follows the decision earlier to drop its iconic butler at the start of 2006. They have also introduced some new applications last year in order to provide users a better search experience.

But lately Ask has decided to refocus on its ability to act as the search engine that will be able to answer questions of it’s users.

A recent research at ComScore shows that Ask is more often used by people searching for specific answers to questions. While such questions account for about 5% of queries to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search, it accounts for almost 15% of Ask’s total search volume.

Some of the New Addition to Ask.com

According to their claim’s the brand new Ask.com will be a lot faster and relevant in terms of search results. The new site will go live from 6th October 2008 in USA and 20th October 2008 in Europe and other parts of the world. They have extensively borrowed their design ideas from Google. (Something tells me, its going to be yet another Google clone….)

In the UK, Google currently dominates over 80% of the market share compared to only 2% for Ask. In the US, Google’s share is slightly less at 60% but Ask’s share remains the same. But searching on Ask remains pretty high. During August 46 million searches were conducted via Ask in the UK which accounts for one in five of all people using a search engine.

European managing director of Ask, Cesar Mascaraque said that Ask will be targeting a very specific group of customer - 35 to 55-year-olds.

The 20 year-old is never going to use us and, you know what, I don’t care..

I can’t load there new page from malaysia, is it working for you? Please share your experiece with the New Ask in the comments.