Link: Ask.com UK. Ask has now got rid of the butler (hurrah!) and has been launched with a really nice new interface. It's very clean and slick. It comes with 2 immediate options - search the Web or the UK only (the UK only version does find .com sites based in the UK such as mine, which is good). The results page is nice and clear with a very limited number of adverts, and a good narrow/expand search feature that I liked.
Advanced search is fine, though it doesn't include options such as limiting by file format, which needs to be addressed.
Over on the right hand side of the page is a 'Search Tools' box, allowing you to choose things such as Images, News, Weather and so on. A nice feature here shows the tie up with Bloglines, and with a single click I can go straight into my bloglines account, which is useful. This box can be edited, so I can position search tools that I frequently use at the top of the list and get rid of those that I don't.
There are new and improved maps/driving directions. I wasn't too keen on those I'm afraid - I prefer the Google approach here, since it's less cluttered and slightly more intuitive.
There's an encyclopedia search, taking content from Wikipedia, Houghton Mifflin and Columbia. I asked for the population of London and got a good result, so was pleased with that.
All in all, I like it a *lot* more than the older version and I think that Ask is definately moving in the right direction.
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