I seem to be seeing the new commercials on television for Ask.com many times per day. [I usually work with the television on, mostly to keep track of time, but also to catch what goes on as the day passes.] The commercials are built around the poor fellow who doesn’t know the ’secret’ that the rest of his friends do. The style is somewhat like the Dr. Scholl’s gel insert ads.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The person who needs something on television, to let him know where to look for something, on the Internet probably doesn’t visit the Internet often. Also, the commercials are somewhat vague, like the aging hipster you just can’t decide has a toupee or not. This is designed to inform while somehow tantalizing those uninitiated to use the search engine. They don’t know it’s a search engine, but they will find out upon putting those three letters in the browser.

I had tried Ask back when it was still ‘Ask Jeeves’ and found it to be passable, but not great, like my favorite of the time, Yahoo. How things change! But then sometimes they don’t. Ask is still just passable, as the few searches I tried seemed to be unusually vague. This was odd because I had asked very specific things. The speed of returned results wasn’t spectacular either, but the could be because they were busy due to an influx of queries.

I thought no more about it until I was reading a couple of articles on Slate, and saw the picture of the Ask toolbar off to the right side. I then went to another site on MSN and the Ask bar was there also. Is Microsoft giving up on MSN search? Or perhaps they just want to swallow up this search engine on their quest to be the only thing in cyberspace.

Actually, I hope it is just advertising dollars being used on MSN, and that Ask gets better with its engine. Competition is good for all, but it also produces also-rans. Does anyone besides me remember Alta Vista? When was the last time you used Lycos?

Tags: lycos, google, ask, alta vista, yahoo, search engine, slate, webcrawler