Ask X

Ask X is a new incarnation of Ask which Barry Schwartz has written about over at SearchEngineLand and Gary Price has added some commentary on it too. The test interface is very sparse, with a battleship grey metalic background, fading into red at the top of the screen. One search box is all you get, with no options.

Your first search gets you 3 panes - on the left is your search, and at this point you get the extra options of images, video and 'more' above the box, and expand and related names below it. if you run other searches you usually get a list of suggestions as you type (unless it's a phrase search you're running) as well.

In the middle pane you get your search results, and mercifully now you actually get to see some results (and Smart answers if appropriate) without great swathes of space being taken up with sponsored results.

Over on the right hand side there are other search results from weblogs, images, the Wikipedia, dictionary, video, news as appropriate for the search that is being run. This isn't consistent however - sometimes the dictionary option would be first, sometimes the images and so on. I'm sure there must be a reason for this, but it's slightly annoying - I'd prefer if Ask had an order they put these in and just left it at that for the sake of consistency.

All in all I like the new layout - there's a lot more information quickly available with no extra work required from me, which has to be a good thing. While the page is compact and crammed with information it doesn't actually look too busy, nor is it complicated. If Ask decided to go with this layout in the future I would certainly see it as a positive move. To be honest, there is so much information that a search engine could provide a user that to limit this seems silly. Clearly the average user, if there is such a thing, isn't going to choose a bunch of options one after another to see everything they want - mostly what they're after is information regardless of the format, and the results page gives them that.