Ask Challenging Google Search Algorithm

Google has been dominating player in the search industry for years mainly due to its superiority on returning the most relevant search results. This leaves all other search engines mountains to climb. However, Ask.com seems to have figured out a new strategy in gaining search market share from Google.

Ask.com, the search engine formely called Ask Jeeves, currently still has less than 6% of US search market share, though it has been in the search industry since 1996, while Google only emerged in 1998 and is currently dominating the US search market with 51% share.

Since dropping Jeeves, Ask has come up with a new algorithm in order to stand a chance on competing with Google. This new algorithm retrieves and ranks search results based on the number of times groups identified as related to the topic reference the site. Ask’s new algorithm is still to prove its superiority though it theoretically avoids displaying generally popular sites that are not frequently referenced by other sites on the topic.

Ask’s new algorithm lets it suggest related queries from within the topic group. A good example is that a search on John Lennon would also bring up related searches about Beatles and Yoko Ono.

On the other hand, Google’s natural search algorithm PageRank focuses on ranking web pages according to both the quantity and quality of links pointing to them.

Google, however, is recently showing signs of shifting away from its core business, search, and diverting its focus on varieties with the objective of getting more information about its individual searchers. This includes Google launching a finance site (finance.google.com) to compete with Yahoo! Finance, an online payment system (checkout.google.com) to compete eBay’s Paypal, and a basic online office (docs.google.com) to compete with Microsoft.

To defense its criticisms on being lack of focus, Google engineer Matt Cutts earlier explained, “In no way is Google taking its eye off search. We have more engineers working on core search technology than ever before. Most employees spend about 75% of their time tweaking the main search algorithm to make results faster, more relevant, and more comprehensive for users. There are always changes going behind the curtains, and changes happen weekly or faster than weekly.”

Only time will tell if Ask will be able to prove itself a well deserved spot on the search algorithm game, though with a small tweaking of its algorithm Google can be way to much for Ask to handle.

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