In any event, best of luck with “Web Answers”. Actually, I wrote about it on our blog too. Check it out if you get a chance.

Best,
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Regarding the layout of the page:

Ask is super-clean and essentially laid out like a standard search site. But we also do a lot of usability studies for how we lay out our features. The main difference with our site vs., say, Google, is the placement of ads in the middle, and Zoom related topics on the right. This is purposeful – we are making that tradeoff consciously. If you see any eye-tracking study (we’ve done some internally and Enquiro has recently done one) of search users, they scan down the left side first to see if there is a relevant result, then immediately scan to the upper right. This is, in some ways, the “bail out” zone, or more constructively, the place they first look to iterate their search. Because less than 1% of users take advantage of advanced search, iteration is a primary need of nearly every searcher. Our Zoom product, which we’ve had for 3 years as “Related Topics”, is the #1 most used feature aside from Web search for precisely this reason. The location is essential to its utility. I do understand that some people prefer sponsored listings out of the way, but hopefully they will only show up if they’re relevant. The left-side, on the other hand, is the wrong location because that’s where people want to see their search results.

Obviously, these are generalizations over an entire user base, and individual preferences may vary.

2. To Jakob’s point about the top result ranking, I have to say I’m not sure what data he is basing it on…and I know Jakob is smarter than to rely on his own qualitiative judgment, or to generalize relevance assumptions based on one query or a handful of biased queries. In addition, our search technology works very differently than he is guessing. The #1 result is the most authoritative site in its “community” based on our local popularity method of ranking. A lot of times that will yield a far different result than Google – sometimes better and sometimes worse, but sometimes just different. This is incredibly valuable, in our view, since it’s a different editorial view of the Web.

Certainly, like other engines, we can still grow the quality of the results over time. The full potential of our technologies has not been realized and we look forward to applying more resources to fulfill that potential in the future.

Jim

If they really live up to the claim to discern truth from the chaos of the Web, then that would be the ultimate benefit. If anybody knows of questions for which false answers are rampant on the Web, please post and see whether Ask dregs up the right or the wrong answer.

Ask still needs to work harder on the prioritization of the main search results listing. Too-often the better sites are down the list and the top site is a lower-quality site that happens to use the keywords prominently.