Ask Jeeves Unveils New Features, "Binoculars"

Ask Jeeves has unveiled both a raft of new shortcuts and a new site preview feature called Binoculars.

You've probably been noticing that many search engines are offering searching shortcuts (called "Smart Search" by Ask Jeeves.) This feature allows you to get very specific kinds of information by searching with certain kinds of words. Ask Jeeves Smart Search Features include:

Movies -- Enter a movie title. Ask Jeeves will return at the top of the results a picture, links to reviews (at Rotten Tomatoes) as well as a link to the official site and a trailer. Seems to work only for current movies; Shrek2 worked while "Bend it Like Beckham" didn't.

Sports Franchises -- Enter the name of a sports franchise and you'll get a variety of pointers including official site, scores, schedule, roster, etc. This appears to be major league only; a search for Montgomery Biscuits (yes, the Montgomery Biscuits) didn't show that information.

There are also some really specific lookups (wedding registries and package tracking) as well as a couple really really specific lookups (like the terror alert level, and a shortcut to get on the "Do Not Call" registry.) You can find a list of available lookups at http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/announcements/searchsmarter.html .

The binocular feature doesn't work in Opera, so I fired up IE. In the search results you'll see that many of the result URLs have a little icon next to them. If you hold your mouse over the icon, you'll get a little popup preview of what the site looks like. This is a nice implementation of the site preview idea with the unfortunate problem of VERY SMALL SCREEN SHOTS. Some pages, no problem. Other pages, all you could tell was that it was red and had some text on it. I'd up the screen shot size a bit.

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