ResearchBuzz

The first thing I thought when I read that Ask was abandoning its general search engine strategy was Well, that’s irony for you. (Wait, I tell a lie. The first thought was “It’s way too early for April Fool.” But the second was the irony thing.)

Here’s the irony: PG Wodehouse had a thing about aunts. If you’ve ever read his books, you’ve discovered that aunts tend to show up as villains, or at least party-poopers. (Notable exception: Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia. Most of the time.) His characters are not shy about expressing anti-aunt sentiments (See the Wikipedia entry on Aunt Agatha for some great quotes.)

So Ask goes from Ask Jeeves, to just Ask, to catering to married women. From much-loved Jeeves, in other words, to much-reviled (at least by him) aunts. Poor PG.

The SF Gate has an article on the whole situation and I see upon reading it closely that Ask is going from Jeeves, in fact, to me. A married woman, an aunt (heck, a great-aunt) who uses the Internet. Ask is going to concentrate on a small segment of the Internet population — married women who need help managing their lives — and abandon the general search engine thing entirely. In the process, there’s been a small number of layoffs, including my good friend Gary Price.

SF Gate refers to Ask as an “also-ran” among search engines. Five years ago I would have agreed completely. Now, I don’t think so. Had this shift in focus happened five years ago, I would not have much cared. Now, I care very much. Ask in the last couple of years has come up with some great offerings. The mapping service. The packed-with-data-but-still-usable search results. The terrific page preview with statistics. AskEraser. And Bloglines. (Hopefully, Bloglines will go on.) So many great things — I’m sad and sorry that Ask isn’t staying in the game.

So far all the announcements I’ve seen about the Ask shift have been from news sources — I have yet to see a blog entry or press release from Ask itself. Perhaps we’ll see something today.

Ask.com launched Ask.com Mobile a while ago. Now it’s also launching “Click to Speak”, a voice-activated directions service.

But let’s start with the mobile part. Ask Mobile is available at http://m.ask.com. Once you’ve reached that address with your Web-enabled phone, you’ll see a “Voice Entry” option on the directions menu.

After what seemed like a very long loading time, a new screen loaded asking me to click to start a call. I did and a few moments later was hooked up with an automated phone system.

(Confidential to Ask: I’m sure the two honks at the beginning of the call are supposed to be cute, but I keep my phone’s volume turned all the way up because I work in a noisy environment. The honks were startling and annoying. I felt like the Aflac duck had crawled in my ear.)

The automated system prompts you by asking for your destination (city/state), and then street or intersection. After that you’re asked for a starting point (city/state), and street or intersection. I thought it was interesting that the system confirms your street addresses, but not the city/states. While the system identified “San Francisco California” with no problem, “Boston Massachusetts” became “Bolton Massachusetts”. There also appears to be no easy way to prompt the system to just start over.

After I had spoken my direction request, a chipper voice told me I’d be getting a text message with directions. Then the call disconnected. Over fifteen minutes later I do not have a text message with the directions.

This is a cool idea, but I’m underwhelmed. The system does not confirm the city/state pairs you specify. It seems to take an oddly long length of time to get street information. And I still haven’t gotten my text message.

I would also like to request a summary from the system. I know that asking it to provide all the directions is a bad idea, but just a summary would be useful. Like, “You’re going from x to y. The distance between the two places is xx miles and takes about xx minutes driving in normal traffic.” That way I’ll have some idea of what I’m getting into before I actually receive the text message. And THEN hang up.

Of course I’ll spend the first post of 2008 catching up! On the other hand, if I do enough of that there will be no need to in 2009…. on December 11, Ask announced AskEraser. AskEraser is simply a little switch at the top of the Ask page. When it’s activated, as Ask notes in its blog, “your search activity will be completely deleted from Ask servers within a number of hours.”

I am probably missing something really obvious here, but I’m wondering why they don’t just flip the switch for everybody. That is to say, erase search activity by default and have “AskNoEraser” for people who want all their searches tracked. Why make privacy an option into which you have to opt? (Ask does note on its blog post that this is just one step the company is taking to disassociate searches from user IP addresses. I suppose things will be developing more over the next year.)

Shortly after the Ask announcement I got an email from the folks at Ixquick. Ixquick is a metasearch engine that takes user privacy very seriously. Ixquick expressed concern about Ask still passing on queries to third parties, like Google, despite the existence of AskEraser. In other words, AskEraser being only as good as the parties to which queries are being passed.

I thought it was a good question and asked Ask. I got a note back from Patrick Crisp at Ask. He noted “Yes, we do pass queries to Google because they need the queries, of course, to serve relevant sponsored listings and the retention of those queries is subject to Google’s policies.” But, “That said, we’ve been working to ensure that the strictest policies are in place with regard to how and which data is necessary and appropriate to share with Google.” The big question here is what Google does with it, but Ask can’t control this.

Finally, “Additionally, with AskEraser, we’re in a very real sense laying down a strong industry ‘marker’ that we expect others will follow.” I hope Ask is right. I do remember when Ask (at that time Ask Jeeves) took a line against popup windows for ads (this was back in 2002.)

If you want more information about AskEraser, Ask has a FAQ available at http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml. That FAQ includes questions about data going to third-party providers, why you must have cookies enabled for AskEraser to work, and in what circumstances AskEraser will track your search activity even when you have it turned on.