Sad news about Ask

As reported by Sarah (the Librarian in Black) Ask.com slashes jobs and changes focus. (Actually reported in a lot of places, but this was where I saw it first when coming in from teaching). As part of their reorganisation one of the redundancies has been Gary Price. Sarah is very disappointed by the news and I am as well. I have no personal concerns for Gary, cos he's so damn good he'll get another job when he wants one, but it's a real shame for Ask and the library community as a whole. Ask was always one of the major search engines that I'd show to people as an example of new and different ways of doing things.

I really found their approach refreshing and pushing back boundaries on search and Ask was a real search engine for librarians. There's more from Gary over at ResourceShelf and SearchEngineLand , which goes to far as to say Ask has been killed. Barry Schwartz has found articles suggesting that Ask will cut a deal with Google and will start to syndicate their results. This wouldn't surprise me, and I think it'll really cut the heart out of the innovation previously enjoyed by the engine - we'll be left with another Google clone.

So... what's worth looking at now? If you want to try a different, innovative and sophisticated engine, which has lots of functionality, good advanced options you could do worse than Exalead.