All Things Web

I stopped by Ask.com today, to check out some results and was suprised with a new look and feel to the engine. I stopped by blog.ask.com the official ask.com blog and saw they launched Ask3D today. A new approach to search.

First lets take a quick look at the announcement from Ask.com

Today, our search experience is taking a consequential leap forward in making all that information accessible in a coherent way, with the launch of Ask3D, a completely re-engineered version of Ask.com. No, you don’t need red and blue glasses to see it. 3D stands for the three dimensions of searching - query expression, investigating results, and digging deeply into content. You used to have to visit three different pages or websites to see and search through each dimension. With Ask3D, you can now get everything you need on one page…in many cases above the fold.

So what does this really mean to the rest of us? Well, at a minimum, it gives us something to play with for the next few days.

Out of the gate, the new design is fairly unique. You have the ability to skin the main page to any of ten different skins or the original default skin. While it’s a “cute feature”, it isn’t something that really changes the functionality of the the actual search. An interesting coat of paint but more of a whoopie doo than a wow.

Now, down to the main search, there are 8 “sections” or areas you can search. They include Web, Images, City, News, Blog, Video, Maps & Directions and Shopping. Individually, these are solid areas that allow you to find pretty much anything you are looking for. However the real fun is in the combined interface of the search results.

So for our example, I used the term golf. Kept it pretty simple and got some very interesting results. The results page brought in a mix of traditional results, recent news, images, local businesses, events and options to narrow and clarify the search. Built on an iFrame structure, this new results page is very interesting and a lot of information is presented immediately.

Overall, I think the new results page is interesting, but only time will tell how much it might catch on. Obviously, this is the direction the major search engines are heading, only time will tell how well this will do.

Yahoo has announced that a new pricing model has been rolled out today at Yahoo Search Marketing. This is great news for anyone marketing using the Yahoo Search Marketing platform.

To quote Yahoo:
Yahoo! Search Marketing is rolling out a new feature that we think will help enhance the quality, potentially reduce the cost and increase the value of traffic to you, our advertisers. It’s called quality-based pricing, and it measures the quality of traffic coming from our distribution partners—that is, the web publishers large and small that display your ads.

Yahoo Rolls Out New Quality Based Pricing

In a bit of recent news from Google, anyone marketing using Google can now utilize three new video ad formats.

This week marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of click-to-play video ads. To that end, we thought it’d be fitting to introduce three new members of our click-to-play video ads family: the 728×90 Leaderboard, the 120×600 Skyscraper, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper. Previously, video ads were only enabled for the 300×250 Medium Rectangle, the 336×280 Large Rectangle, the 200×200 Small Square, and the 250×250 Square.

More information on this expansion of the AdSense video program can be read here.

So this was an interesting release from the Official Google Blog today, and I’m sure this is a toy that many will find amuzing at the least and addicting to the extreme for others.

Google Labs has released HotTrends, a near real time source for the hottest searches out at the moment.

Just in case you wanted to know, the Hot Trend as of 8 PM Today is Justis Richert, the Trooper suspended from his job for supposedly helping to get a porn star out of a ticket for “time served”.

So thanks to our friends over at Search Engine Land, there is talk that there is an update coming this week from Yahoo. May not be much, but everyone should be aware. I always love to see updates for the major engines and I love more to watch everyone respond to them. Should be a fun filled week for all.

Yahoo Search Index Update starting May 22, 2007.