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Search market: far to go

Victor Keegan

The task for the next decade is to ensure the benefits of search are spread to poorer people around the world.

CAN YOU teach an old search engine new tricks? At a time when search has become almost synonymous with Google this is a tall order — but ask.com is having a go. This week, it re-invented itself, shedding baggage such as intrusive advertising, cluttered desktops, links aimed at raising money rather than informing and even its former name, Ask Jeeves.

The aim? To go for Google. It believes that Google is very vulnerable. This is true partly because of its sheer size. But its squeaky clean image has also been tarnished by criticism from publishers because of its plan to scan whole libraries, from liberals angered by its acceptance of censorship in China and from punters worried that its search for money will tarnish its search for knowledge.

Ask, which claims 6 per cent of the U.K. search market, reckons Google's vulnerability could make a 10 per cent market share a realisable goal.

The new Ask could claim to be the only "pure" search engine of any size. It is not a portal, it is dedicated to search without Google's "clip-ons" (such as email), has a clear home page, and has not — yet — ventured into China. How clean can you get?

But does it work? The home page has a (customisable) toolbox on the right, enabling you to directly search images, news, weather, dictionaries, and so forth.

Search inquiries throw up several sponsored links in a shaded box above the actual search results. The links were interestingly different from Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Whether this was down to Ask's trendy claim to rank results based on popularity within communities as well as number of links is difficult to say — but it does illustrate a general truth about search engines: it is good to have a diversified portfolio. Search is still in its infancy and the "hidden web," the iceberg of buried data, is only now being mined seriously.

Search engines have revolutionised access to knowledge in little more than a decade. The answer to anything is a mouse click away from anyone able to access a computer. The task for the next decade is to ensure the benefits of search are spread to poorer people around the world.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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