Bjorn Tipling

Ok I’m not paid to be a company shill, I’m just an engineer/UI guy, but it’s hard not to be positive about working for such a cool company. The press coverage for AskEraser seems to be mostly positive. Here are some of my favourite blogs’ comments/reviews:

Henry Blodget, my favorite blogging genious says that “IACI’s Ask.com continues to have the best search engine in the business” but that AskEraser is irrelevant and that “features won’t win the search business. And neither does advertising.” Heh. In a subsequent post today about search engine marketshare he predicts bad things for Ask: “Ask is going to get squeezed out of the search market. Its only hope is to focus on a niche or sell itself to Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.” Well shit.

paidcontent.org, one of the coolest blogs ever, as always only reports the facts (and don’t editorialize them like other blogs do, which is why they’re so awesome), but get them wrong, and so see me jump to the rescue in the comments and look they corrected it with a strike through. I should get paid for this.

Mashable, the blog that paid me $100 to troll them, likes Ask.com’s new feature, and are so happy about it they forgot to spell check: “However, this is a good move by Ask.com; if you can’t be better than Google as far as search is concernet [sic], find some area where you can actually show that you’re better than the competition and capitalize on that. It all adds up in the end.”

The whole thing is big news today and Blogrunner and Techmeme are doing a great job tracking the whole thing. Technorati’s new meme tracker…not so much. I don’t know how they track things, but at best it’s confusing and opaque, and at worst, well…heh.

I used to love Slate, until they started having videos on their home page start on auto-play, but a recent reddit link let me to this funny article, titled “A Librarian’s Worst NightmareYahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong.”

Here’s a quote (emphasis added):

“While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web.”

That’s all true, but man it’s so addictive to try and get your score up. When I was playing with it, I figured out how to get awarded the ‘right’ answer most of the time. You search for questions that are about to expire that have no answers, and then come up with a half way decent answer, and BOOYA: 10 points awarded. Not very good for ‘authority’ or ‘accuracy’, but hey, it’s fun!

Ask.com, the best search engine ever, also my place of employment, just added AskEraser which allows you some privacy safeguards other search engines don’t. I didn’t get to work on it much, but I know guys and gals who did and they busted their butts trying to get this in before the holiday, so hats off to all of them. And hats off to you for checking it out. Check it out:

Better check out the FAQ page on the details. Also watch the Ask.com blog for any updates.

Read More:

The New York Times: Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy
AP @ Yahoo News: Ask.com to unveil new privacy control
Search Engine Land: Ask.com Launches AskEraser Giving Searches Ability To Search Anonymously

Recently Google started to index its Blogger blog’s images. There was some speculation as to why they had not done so already. Well here’s a clue:

Want some results with your spam? Notice that all of those spam links come from the Blogger blogspot.com domain. You can see the search for yourself.

Wow, I love this quote from Garret Rogers at Googling Google, a zdnet blog:

” Even great companies like Ask have been spinning their wheels for years while spending millions on advertising — and in some ways, you can argue that they even have superior search technology. ”

I’m biased though - I work at Ask (and I love it) .